


Breathing Water, Spitting Air

by orphan_account



Category: The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Genre: Bullying, Domestic Violence (Harrison), Emotional/Psychological Abuse, M/M, Non-Consensual Bondage, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexual Assault, Sociopathic Behavior, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Imagery, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-24
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2017-12-21 04:29:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 30,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/895830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Flash knows he's made mistakes. He just never expected to pay for them. </p>
<p>DarkAU where Peter sort of isn't very nice. At all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Flash thinks he's alone. Thinking he's alone, he drops his head into his hands and groans.

“Hey,” says a familiar voice, “ _I'm_ the one who got community service.”

Flash stops breathing. Just stops. His lungs lock up like they mean to save Parker the trouble of killing him. He turns his head slowly, and finds the lanky shadow leaned up against the locker-room door. 

Flash can't make out Parker's expression. He'd left most of the lights off when he came in. 

“Parker.” The name comes out with all the breath he's been holding. “What do you want?” He tries to sound like himself. Angry. Loud. Confident. Instead, he sounds like someone who's been violently sick. 

Parker straightens up and takes a step forward, halfway into the light. 

“Came to _kiss,_ ” there's an emphasis on the word Fash doesn't like, and a memory of a mistake he likes even less, “and make up, of course.” 

Flash prays that the cliché is a coincidence, in the same way that a man standing on the gallows might pray for the hinges to stick.

“Not interested,” he says, forcing his voice steady even as his sweat turns to ice. He stands up, and reaches for his locker. “Get lost.”

Flash remembers his mistake. Treasures the memory in a private part of his mind which he prefers never to acknowledge except in the darkest nights and deepest, safest fantasies. It was just the one time. 

_Was it? Really?_

But only once that he couldn't deny the moment and turn it into something less twisted. 

He'd shoved Peter against a wall and leaned in too close for too long, lips almost touching and eyes laughing at the boy who'd never be able to call him out on it because Flash could lie and Peter couldn't. Who would believe him?

He hadn't taken it further than that, not ever. He's messed up, but not that bad.

_Aren't you?_ mocks an inner voice, _You sure? Sure you weren't just scared you'd get caught? Scared to take the risk?_

_No!_ Flash tries to shut the voice down, tries to breathe normal. _No. I didn't. I wouldn't._

Did plenty of other things though, didn't he? Pushed Parker around; pushed him down, every chance he got. He knew it was all kinds of senseless. Even so, he's never considered that the tables could get turned on him. 

Parker takes another step. The single overhead light adds yellow sparks to his eyes. 

“You can't remember? You did something like,” Peter sets a hand to Flash's chest and shoves him into the lockers. The hand on his chest stays, pinning him there as Peter leans in close. _“This.”_ Flash feels the word as a breath against his lips. 

“Parker.”

Flash can't meet Peter's stare. His eyes can't get past the other boy's grin, which is crooked and savage and full of teeth. Flash pulls a deep breath. It's hard, like the air's scared to stay inside him. “F-fuck off.” The word's come out breathless and small, and not even a shadow of how he'd meant to sound.

_Yeah. Sure. That's really telling him._

Parker's still for a moment. Then, “Boo!” His head snaps forward.

Flash flinches, slamming against the wall. Hard. Pain throbs behind his eyes, while Peter's derisive laughter echoes around his skull.

“Hell, Flash. You should see yourself right now. Hey.” The hand on his chest shifts to his arm. “That's not a bad idea.” Peter's fingers dig into his flesh. Now Flash is a lot less confused about why the basketball hadn't shifted a fraction no matter how hard he tried to pull it out of Peter's hand.

Flash isn't weak. He knows he isn't. But back in the gym, Parker batted him to the floor like he was some ten-year-old playing contact against a pro footballer. Now, resistance barely seems to register.

“Hands off, Parker.” 

Flash's feet skid across tile. He tries to elbow Peter in the gut, but his arm won't budge. “Seriously, let. go.” 

Parker shoves him, instead, straight into the sink. The edge catches his stomach and he's forced almost nose-to-nose with his reflection in the mirror. 

Flash tries to twist around, spitting out threats. “Parker, let me go right now, or I swear I'll fuck you up so bad that--”

The words choke off as a hand grips his throat. The shock stops him cold, but it's Peter's expression which freezes him solid. The flat look on Peter's face makes him think that he could die, he could outright die right now. One long squeeze. That's all it would take. 

And no, that shouldn't be possible, not from Parker, but Flash isn't about to argue with reality while it's got a hand around his neck.

He goes absolutely still. Peter's just looking at him, no expression but intense. Then the grin comes back. It's lopsided and terrifying, but Flash no longer thinks he's about to die.

Which is only reassuring if dying is worse than the alternatives. 

The hand on his throat slides up to grip his jaw, and force his head towards the mirror. 

“Look,” Peter says, soft voice making it seem like a suggestion when it isn't one, “Come on. 'S not hard.”

Flash meets his own eyes in the mirror. Now he's got some idea of what a damned soul heading to hell looks like. 

“Parker” _Please._ Flash clenches his jaw over the word. Chokes it down along with his rising panic. He can't beg, not here, not to Peter, because Peter has never once begged him. “Let go, and get the fuck away. We got nothing to do with each other now.”

“You wish.”

Flash's breath catches on the deja vu, because they've been here before. 

_”Leave us alone!”_ He remembers Peter's face, younger and angry and scared and red with humiliation. And his own answer, coming out with a laugh, _”You wish, Parker. You wish.”_

_(And had it been an 'us' back then, back when Peter had friends, who stopped being friends when they learned to back down to Flash, and Peter didn't, because Peter--_

_\--Never backed down. Not to Flash)._

Whatever he might have said next, whatever words are forming to try and defuse the situation, they drop out of his head when he hears voices outside. Bad goes to worse and fear ticks over to terror, a kind he hadn't felt, even with a hand gripping his neck. He tries to straighten and push away from the sink, but Peter's got him pinned. 

If someone walks in right now, what will they see? What will they _think?_

Like he's read his mind, Parker lets his hand drop. It catches on the hem of his shorts. Flash is too stunned to speak for a second, long enough for Peter to start inching the elastic down over his hips. The movement is deliberately slow, like terror is something to be savored. 

Flash's voice finally gets out, coming in a whispered rush. “Areyoufuckinginsane!” He grabs the gym shorts, trying to keep them in place. They get tugged right out from between his fingers.

The voices are getting closer, louder outside the locker room door, and he can feel Parker's jeans pressed up against his ass, belt-buckle digging into the base of his spine. 

“Worried, Flash? Heh. Yeah. School'll have a field day with this one. Think about it. Everyone you've ever humiliated...” Parker's words are a whisper against Flash's neck. “Hey. Think one of them will think to take a picture with their phone? Spread it online?”

Flash presses both palms to the sink's edge, shoving frantically until his muscles start to shake with the strain. 

“Bet you'll never be able to show your face here again. Like 'ol Mavis. Remember him? Poor kid switched schools because of you. But switching schools won't be enough, will it? Not if pictures get out.”

Flash's breath comes short and fast and shallow. “Alright!” it's as close to a scream as a human whisper can get. “Alright, I get it! I'm sorry.” His voice breaks. “I get it. I'm sorry.”

The door clicks.

Parker moves. He drags Flash through a shower cubical, and around to the next one, furthest from the door. He jerks the curtain shut just as voices flood into the room.

Flash presses back under the showerhead. 

He recognizes the voices. He recognizes all of them. Tom West, and Mathew Tavis, and the team. _His_ team. Flash's heart is pounding like it wants out, and his hand clamps over his own mouth to stop the panting that sounds so loud in his own ears. 

He's presenting the perfect image of a terrified coward. He knows he is. And Parker's seeing it, and that has _got_ to be payback enough, doesn't it?

No. 

Flash chokes on a scream as Parker moves in closer, and shoves a knee between his legs. Lockers are slamming and voices are echoing and his entire team is _right there,_ right outside. They're the closest things to friends he's got. 

And they'll tear him to pieces in a thousand ways if they find him like this. 

_Parker, no._

_Please._

It's practically a prayer, but God's not listening. Neither is Parker. A knee slides up under his balls, tight to the point of pain. Casually, like he's not ripping Flash's world apart at the seams, Parker reaches down and fists his cock.

Flash tries to swallow his knuckles, fingers jamming into his mouth because they're the only gag he can reach. His other hand shoves at Peter's chest, trying to push him away. It's like trying to push away a concrete wall. 

This has to stop this. Now. Ten seconds ago.  
Too late. 

Peter huffs out a laugh, too soft to get picked up by the team. (Because they're loud, always making noise, and right now that's the only thing Flash has got to be grateful about). His thumb rubs over Flash's rapidly hardening tip. Flash stares at him, too scared to care that his eyes are practically begging. He shakes his head. 

Peter's return stare is bright. Malicious. Merciless. He's years away and far removed from the frail kid Flash remembers from day one, acting all shy and awkward and saying _”Stop,”_ and _”We didn't do anything!”_ and _”Sorry. I'm sorry, ok? Just leave the-- Flash!”_ when he didn't have anything to be sorry about, and was just saying anything to make Flash stop. 

How has he changed so much?

The answer comes crawling out of Flash's subconscious like something horrible creeping up from a stuck drain.

_How do you think? Years of getting shoved around and beat on like a bitch? Ring any bells, Eugene?_

Flash's legs shake. He bites his knuckles, expecting pain to counterbalance the sensation of Peter's hand around his cock. It doesn't.

Words and phrases echo in from outside the shower, slipping through Flash's panic. Tim West, talking about some girl he got laid with. Tavis, saying he's making it up. Yesterday Flash would've been out there, dumping fuel on the fire and ribbing West with words that'd be just a little rougher than normal locker room camaraderie allows for. Because Flash Thompson doesn't have friends. Only people who know it's safer behind him. 

Parker's free hand drifted up to his chest, ignoring Flash's efforts to push him away. His thumb brushes a nipple. Then it turns, the nail digging in savagely. 

“Hnnf!” the sound is out before Flash can stop it. He stares wide-eyed at Peter, who grins back at him, eyebrows arched. 

Flash waits for the conversation to break, for one of the boys to come back and tug aside the curtain. Seconds pass like minutes. Nothing happens. A locker slams. West's voice, sounding farther away now and receding with a shuffle of sneakers and an opening door: “Shit, guys, I'm telling you, she really did!”

Then the locker room's door slams shut on silence. Parker lets go. He steps back. 

Flash's tooth-marked knuckled drop from his mouth. It takes a second to realize that those strangled, choking sounds are coming from him, and another to make them stop.

They're gone. They won't find him. He's shaking, humiliated, physically aroused and possibly about to hurl, but he's _safe_.

Until he looks up, and Peter's eyes remind him that he isn't.

Flash tugs at his shorts, but Peter's voice freezes him in place. “No.”

Peter is standing with his arms folded and his head tilted to the side, smiling faintly. “Stay like that.”

Flash doesn't move. Then he realizes that he isn't moving, and what that looks like. He shakes his head, spits out a _“Fuck you,”_ and tugs at the shorts. Peter's hand catches his wrist and suddenly he's _right there_ again, crowding Flash back against the wall and trapping the hands that try to shove him away. 

“You got lucky, huh? Looks like a picture of you getting felt up in the locker room won't get posted all over school.” Peter leans in close. Flash's head hits the wall. Again. Same spot as before, and he's seeing stars. And feeling teeth. Peter's mouth closes high on his neck, right below the ear. He tries to twist away, but Peter follows the movement easily, pressing harder. All Flash can hear is his own erratic breathing as Peter works patiently. Finally he pulls away and examines the spot. 

“Guess that'll have to do. Hey, don't glare. Better than a picture. You can say Gwen did it. Oh... wait. I forgot to mention, Gwen and I got a date. I don't think she's your girlfriend anymore, Eugene. Soooorry 'bout that.”

Flash says nothing. He doesn't trust his voice. 

Peter's hand drifts over Flash's chest again, pressing sharply against the damaged skin. It hurts. Flash wishes it was the only pain. 

“Aren't you going to tell me to stop?”

“...” 

Parker stops. His hand falls away, and he hisses out in a stunned laugh. “You want this. You fucking _want_ this.”

Flash shakes his head mutely. 

“No? So say it. Tell me to stop.”

“Parker...” Flash is going to cry. He hasn't cried since he was fucking _ten years old,_ and he's going to cry. So Flash does what Flash does best, and gets mad instead. Except that when Peter catches his fist mid-swing and slams his wrist against the wall, the mad's gone and the fear's back and it feels like everything is breaking. 

They stay like that, eye to eye. Flash is blinking furiously. 

“Holy fuck,” Peter breathes. “You're fucked up. I mean, I knew that. But not this much. I don't think I can make things worse for you, so, uh, yeah. Have fun with that.”

Peter lets go. 

Flash slides to the floor. He drops his head into his arms. He can hear Peter's footsteps echoing across the tiles, leaving.

Then he hears them coming back. 

Parker bats the curtain aside and stands over him, staring down. “You know what? No. You're going to come.” He drops onto his haunches. Before Flash can react, Peter's got one hand on his knee, forcing it open, and the other reaching between his legs. 

The touch is rough. Peter pumps him steadily, almost clinically, like someone doing a chore. If humiliation could kill outright then Flash would be dead, because his body's responding and the shreds of his pride are getting burned up as a byproduct. 

But he feels numb. Nothing. Blank. He chokes out something that's barely a sound, but after that he's just staring, and feeling like he doesn't understand anything he sees. 

“Come on,” says Peter. “Come.”

Flash feels it like it's happening to someone else. Hot sticky semen splatters across his stomach, and his insides seem to cave in around some gaping hole as Peter walks off again, this time for good.

Water runs. A soap dispenser whines, and the flow is broken.  
Then Peter's gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Flash is missing shots. It happens sometimes, when he can't slow down, can't focus. 

Can't stop using the ball like a weapon. 

Hist last throw bounces off the backboard (the new backboard) and the team groans. Flash wants to hit something. And keep hitting. Hit until there's nothing left that can hit back. 

_(Wants to hide behind “normal,” but can't. Not under the memory of Peter's teeth on his neck)._

"Take a bench, Thompson," says the coach. 

"What?" Flash does a double-take that ends in a glower when he meets the man's _'You heard me'_ expression. 

"This is _practice."_ He stresses the word. Players don't get benched during practice, and especially not the team ace. What the hell kind of sense does that make?

"We're supposed to be practicing," says the coach, face impassive. "I've got no idea what you're doing, Thompson, but it's disrupting the entire team. Take a bench."

Flash looks around him. There's a space. Has been all day, nobody wanting to get too close. If he meets anyone's eye, they look away quick. 

When they first started practice, West tried to break the tension with an exaggerated leer and a, _"Yo, Flash, what's up with your neck?"_ Fash had touched the bandaid below his ear. _"Bugbite,"_ he'd said tersely. _"Some kind of spider."_

Then he deliberately landed West hard on his ass during an intercept, and there were no more questions.

"Whatever," Flash spits out, and stalks off. Not to the bleachers. No way. And not to the locker room. 

_Just-- no._

He heads towards his next class instead. There's no call-back from the coach. He's already directing the rest of the team. 

Flash's team.

_(The team that stood ten paces away while he came apart under Parker's hands, and did it quiet, because getting found by them was worse than letting it happen)._

There's no call-back from them, either. 

\- - -

Out in the hallway, Flash passes closed classrooms. Every door is a point of sound.

_"The death penalty was enacted in the case of--"_

_"His mouth and eyes covered by apparent_ spiderwebs--"

_"''Tu quoque,' or “Appeal to hypocrisy,” refers to--"_

Flash doesn't pay attention. Today, and last night, when sleep wasn't happening, he's been angry. _(Terrified)_ Furious. _(Sick to the pit of his stomach and telling his mind to stop, stop everything, because he can't face the things that he's not thinking about)._

The bell rings. Shrill. Sharp. An alarm triggering his nervous system and telling him to _run._

Flash stops instead and scrubs a hand across his sweat-stung eyes. 

From behind the closed lids he can feel Parker's breath, washing across his lips, and hear the voice saying, 

_"You did something like..."_

_"This,"_

And, 

_"Don't you remember?"_

He remembers. How good it felt. Pushing Parker against the locker and leaning in too close, too long, eyes laughing while Parker had nowhere to run. 

He's sweating again. And freezing. And remembering the drag of Parker's fingers along his skin. 

"Flash?" A girl's voice. A hand on his shoulder. "Are you--"

He shoves her away roughly, automatic as breathing. Then, the hell? There are people around him, swarming out from every doorway while he's been standing rooted in the center of the hallway. 

Gwen stumbles back. Almost trips. 

Flash makes an abortive move to catch her. To say sorry, somehow, maybe, without actually having to say it. She's already on her feet by the time he tries, and her shocked look morphs into a cold, blank anger. 

“Gwen,” he says, but she's gone; turned on her heel and left in a flurry of bright blond hair and clenched fists. 

When Flash turns, he sees Peter standing by his open locker. Peter closes the locker, and turns away.

Not angry, or guilty, or deliberate.

Just bored. Like he hasn't seen anything very interesting.

\- - -

Flash finds him in the library.

"Parker," he says, and plants his hands on the table. He tells himself that they're not shaking.  
Visibly. 

Really.

"Not today, Flash." Parker keeps his eyes on his open notebook, pen flitting across the pages. Some kind of sketch. There's a jagged spider doodled in the corner. 

That's all Flash sees before he jerks the notebook out from under the pen. The pen leaves a long, dark gash across the page. 

"If you want to fight," Flash says, spitting it out fast because he doesn't want to remember Peter's bone-bruising grip, or think about what he's inviting "then we fucking fight. But not— not." _That.”_ I never--"

_Almost never._

"—I wouldn't. I didn't. To you."

_Liar._

Parker doesn't say anything for a moment. He's looking at the ink-dark gash on his notebook, cutting through the sketch and probably scoring the sheet behind it, too. 

Not the first thing of Parker's Flash has ruined. Stolen notebooks. A broken camera. Shoes tossed onto the school roof. 

_(Dark bruises, and his hand over Parker's heart to hold him in place while Flash leaned in close and told him exactly why. Even if Flash didn't use words. Or understand the explanation. Or see his own expression, except as a reflection in Parker's eyes)._

He just knows that he couldn't leave Parker alone. And still can't. 

But Parker? Parker just reaches for his notebook. "Go away, Flash."

"Or what, Parker?" Flash says, and it's habit talking, habits from a not so distant past. Or, hell, maybe he means it. Maybe it's asking for the answer he came looking for. 

_Or what?_

He keeps his hand planted on the notebook. 

Parker stands. He sets his hand over Flash's, and for a second Flash is thinking _'Broken fingers,'_ and _'Pain,'_ and _'no basketball.'_ But Parker just leans forward, and then further forward, over the table and right into Flash's personal space, _too close,_ and getting closer. 

At school, in the middle of the library.

Flash flinches back. His heel catches a chair leg which clatters loud across the wood floor. If no one was looking before, they've got to be now. 

Parker just picks up the damned notebook and drops it into his book-bag. He's grinning. 

Flash looks around, and catches the eye of this girl he vaguely recognizes. Bookish, artsy, weird hair. Used to do the doe-eyed look in his direction. Now mostly just does death glares. He's maybe a chucked a basketball at her projects once or twice. Anyway, she's watching. Big time. 

"What are you--" he starts, meaning to finish with 'looking at.' His tone is loud. Belligerent. And he's hearing it like it's coming from someone else. 

Parker grips his arm. Flash falters. When he looks, the other boy's eyes are as cold as he's ever seen them. 

Flash stutters. Actually stutters. And mostly thanks to his whole "shouting-in-a-library" thing, _everybody sees it._

Flash tears free of Parker's grip. He shoves his hands in his pockets, ducks his head, and heads for the exit. Fuck this. Fuck everything.

He's out the doors and halfway down the hallway before he realizes that Parker is following. He's caught the door that Flash slammed behind him, and is closing it slowly. Gently. 

Flash spins around to glare at him. 

"Don't," he says.

Parker gives him a Look. Its got eyebrows in it, and they're doing a contortion act. "Don't what?"

Anything. Everything. Starting with that expression.

And also walking forward like that, towards Flash, while moving like a threat. 

Flash starts to think that maybe, just maybe, he's done something kind of stupid. 

He starts to step back. Stops.

_(Because it's always worse when he runs, when the old man gets pissed and tells him to “never show your goddamned back, you fucking dumbass. Never.”)_

“Whatever,” Flash says. Then because Parker is still coming, “Whatever, Parker. Leave me alone.”

Peter stops, just this side of a comfortable distance. "What makes you think I wasn't going to?”

_Wasn't..._

“You know why--”

“You," Peter points, "came to me. Just now." He gestures at the library. "In there." 

"And before that?" Flash doesn't shout. He almost loses his voice in the strain of not shouting. This time he's the one to step forward and lean in too close. Scare tactic. It works, too. Just not on Peter.

"Why," Flash grits out, regretting the move because now he can't back out, and Parker looks anything but worried. "Just, why."

And maybe he should stop listening to the voice of an old, drunk idiot who he hates. 

_(loved too much, looked up to too much, before it went to hell)._

Maybe he should stop taking his beatings head-first. But when Parker huffs, shakes his head, and starts to step around him, Flash grabs a fistful of his jacket.

“So what do you want, Parker. Huh?” His voice rises. He doesn't stop it. Doesn't remember where they are, or what kind of trouble this could cause. “To get back at me?”

He laughs. Tries for derisive. “Whatever. Bring it. Maybe you popped some serious pills, Parker, but you're still you.”

“Um. Well. Yeah? I'm me.”

Parker looks down at his shirt, clenched around Flash's fist. Then he looks up again, and his face is blank. He looks past Flash. Points. 

“I think it was right over there,” he says.

Flash follows the pointing finger, but he already knows without looking. 

“What was?” he asks, faking it.

_(It wasn't there. Peter's got it wrong. It was further down, where the old payphones used to be, before the school tore them out because of the prank calls to 911, which Flash wasn't a part of, because his dad was a cop, and then Flash decked the kid who did it--)_

But maybe Peter remembers, and it's just too far to prove a point. Easier to push Flash against the wall where he'd pointed, crushing Flash's arm between them because he hasn't let go, and,

And. 

Flash figures he's a good kisser. Probably. No one's ever told him otherwise. But he's never been the one with his lip between someone else's teeth, because he's the one who does that shit.

And the hand, running up the back of his thigh? 

No. No, because of reasons. So many reasons. 

_“What are you,”_ he starts to say. Or, tries to. Hard to finish, when a tongue gets shoved up under his. There's a push, and Flash's head is back against the wall with a _”thunk”_ and nowhere else to go. 

Flash fights it. Gets maybe an inch or two off the wall before he's shoved back again, and hard enough to take whatever breath he's got left. 

Then, as abrupt as he started, Parker's done. But he doesn't go far. He stares at Flash from a few inches away, then backs off further slowly. Like a camera changing focus. 

Flash straightens. He scrubs a sleeve over his mouth and glances towards the library doors. They're still closed. Still blind. 

And that's the first thing he thinks about? Peter Parker has just face-fucked him with his tongue in the middle of a school corridor, and is still standing there, and that's his first move. To make sure nobody saw. 

Maybe he needs to get his head checked. 

But, hey, that's not exactly a revelation. 

Flash isn't sure where the laugh come from. It starts as a shudder in his lungs, morphing into something low and hoarse, scraping his throat like sandpaper. 

He slumps back against the wall, and gasps for a breath that doesn't have a hitch in it.

“What the hell,” he says, and for a moment, he's not feeling anything. 

Parker's voice brings him back. “You're fucked up,” he says. It's the same tone someone would use to say, _“Your shoelaces are coming untied, bro,”_ or _“Hey, you're fly's open, might want to fix that.”_

“Look who's talking,” says Flash. “Peter fucking Parker.”

This time Flash doesn't flinch. Parker sets a hand by his head, not touching any part of him. He leans in. Still not touching. Not quite. And holds it there.

And Flash? For one insane second, Flash feels like leaning forward and closing the gap makes perfect sense. So he does. 

"Freak," he mutters, against Parker's lips. 

The second of insanity is gone, but his actions aren't _(story of his life),_ and there's not going to be a "normal." Not ever. 

Parker just laughs, and bites his lip again.


	3. Chapter 3

Parker breaks up with Gwen. 

_"Freak,"_ concludes the school. But they knew that already. Gwen walks the halls with red eyes, and her grades just a little lower than usual.

_"I should feel bad,"_ Parker says, talking to the only person who might understand. _"I should. I know."_

His reflection glances back at him. It shrugs. Those eyes in the mirror say it all. 

_I don't._

_I don't remember how._

He shrugs out of his bloodstained shirt, and goes to bed.

\- - -

Work. School. People.

"Hey, freak."

_Person._

Flash.

Flash, who's prying the headphones off Peter's ears and tossing them on the table. Peter catches them, because, hello? Expensive? 

"Yes?" says Peter. 

Once, he would have come out with: _"My name's Parker."_ or something equally useless, but now he doesn't bother. He figures he could probably force Flash to call him _'Peter,' 'Parker,'_ or _'Your royal highness: lord of of all he surveys,'_ but it doesn't seem worth the effort. Or the detention. 

Besides, truth doesn't bother him anymore. 

He sets the headphones down carefully, and looks up at Flash. Just looks. It's funny, how he doesn't have to do anything else. 

_(Flash was always_ doing; _all noise and action and effort)._

Flash's jaw goes tight. Trying not to swallow, Peter thinks, and almost laughs because, yep, there it goes. His eyes unconsciously track the movement. For a second, he wants to rest his hand there, pressing just a little, and feel that motion under his palm. 

_Weird._

True, he'd had the guy's dick in his hand, but _that_ had been payback. 

_(Payback for a hand on his chest and a bruise over his heart and an almost-kiss on a split lip)._

And Flash was supposed to leave him alone after that. 

Peter blinks. Flash said something.

"What?" he says, not because he didn't hear, but because what he heard doesn't make sense. "Gwen?"

"Yeah. Gwen. What the fuck are you doing, Parker?"

Peter thinks about what he's doing with Gwen. These days?

"Nothing," he answers, honestly.

Flash isn't looking at him. Not quite. Not until he is, with so great a visible effort that Peter experiences this perverse impulse to applaud. 

He unhooks his headphones instead, switching off his mp3 player and shoving both into his bag. 

"I haven't actually got time for this," he says.

Flash kicks the table. It rattles, bumping into Peter's ribs and trapping him against the wall.

Peter glances at it, then up at Flash. 

Flash, who's got stupidity confused for courage, and has his hands on the table to hold it in place.

_Just give it a shove,_ Peter thinks, _set him on his stupid ass, and go to work._

But Peter doesn't. He sets his elbows on the table instead, relaxing, and ignoring the pressure against his sternum.

He's tired. He hadn't gotten much sleep last night. Work was too boring to pay attention to, and his boss had caught him sleeping, and he might not have a job anymore if he shows up late-- and he's going to show up late if he doesn't leave now--

but Flash is glaring at him. Flash is _here,_ and not cowering on the far side of the school, like Peter planned.

_And that's... something._

Damned if he knows what. 

"I'm not doing anything with Gwen," Peter repeats, voice not changing. 

"She's crying," says Flash.

"Oh." Peter considers that. Shrugs. "So?"

"So, she's my _friend,_ asshole!"

_Friend._

The feeling is like grinning with a split lip. Or like looking into the eyes of a guy who wants to kiss the guy he hates. Hates, because he wants to kiss him. Something like that. 

Flash has friends now, does he? Sure. Like those friends in the locker room. The ones who hang around Flash like sucker fish on a shark.

Used to hang around him, anyway. 

And Gwen?

"Oh, yeah," Peter says slowly, picking his words. "She told me. She talked about you. A lot."

The flicker of unease shoots across Flash's face like a mouse running for cover. It's almost quick enough to miss, but Peter is watching for it. He smiles. "Your dads worked together, right?"

_(And you weren't dating. Not ever)._

_("We let people think that, but," Gwen told him, and laughed. "I mean, Flash? We're not even-- no.")_

"Old family friend, right?" Peter finishes. 

_Old family friend who knows too much about you._

_And didn't mind telling it to her nice new boyfriend. Because she wanted me to feel sorry for you. Wanted me to forgive you for being an asshole, Flash. Because she's nice._

_She's nice._

_And look what she's done to you._

Flash isn't saying anything. He's got his hands shoved into his pockets, not on the table anymore. His face is expressionless. And visibly struggling to stay that way. 

_Is Gwen still your friend, Flash?_

Peter sets a fingertip to the table's edge, and slides it away from him. 

"Cops," he says, casually, looking at the table but watching Flash out of the corner of his eye, "get a of leeway from other cops, don't they? Because other cops _get it._ And normal people don't. Or something." 

"Whatever you think you know," Flash starts, and stops dead when his voice cracks. 

Peter lets the silence hang for a minute, but Flash makes no move to continue. 

_Flash fucking Thompson,_ Peter thinks. Then, _No. Eugene. Poor, pathetic little Eugene, who wanted to be someone else so bad that--_

But it isn't pity he's feeling. The joke might be horrible, but it still makes him laugh. 

"You protected him too," he says. 

The stricken look on Flash's face tugs horribly at something underneath Peter's viscous apathy. It's an anger he's almost forgotten about; an echo from a kid who hadn't figured he'd end up like this, doing these things, and barely feeling anything except a sick sense of amusement. 

Maybe he's got his own version of Eugene in there, somewhere, a lost child he suffocated on the way to becoming him. 

But it doesn't matter. 

_(Doesn't matter that it didn't have to be this way. Didn't have to have to turn out so fucking stupid, for all of them, with only the pain to make it funny)._

Peter sighs. 

"I really don't have time for this," he announces, more to the universe at large than to Flash, who's in no state to care, and probably never was. 

Peter stands up. And doesn't miss the way that Flash edges back from him, staring at him, but like he's seeing somebody else. No bluffing. No lies. Just for a few seconds, Peter is seeing the kid behind the bullshit. 

The one he took to pieces a few weeks ago. Because he wanted to, because he could, and because there was no one to stop him. 

And he still doesn't know how to feel bad about it. 

"Flash," Peter says, very gently, although it's probably too late for that tone to mean anything. He'd spoken that way in the locker room, too. "Run. Call the cops. Get a therapist. Whatever." 

He thinks for a second, and adds, "Or call Gwen." 

Gwen, who's crying, but who is also tough enough to keep Flash on the leash he needs, and nice enough to not-- 

_(--Not enjoy that stricken look on his face. Or want more. Or wonder what faces Flash will make, if Peter does half the things he's thinking about doing)._

"Fuck you!" Flash practically spits it. In a voice so low and broken that Peter half expects to see cracked teeth and blood. 

"Nah," says Peter, "that's not how it would go. Sorry." 

Ok, lame cliche, but, jeesh, this is getting heavy. All Peter wants to do is take Flash somewhere dark for a while, and finish messing him up, so no need for all this serious shit. It isn't what he thought he wanted, or planned to want, but he wants it now, and _Flash won't take a fucking hint._

Instead, predictable as a breaking wave, Flash looks like he's going to throw a punch. 

Maybe some of Gwen's morals rubbed on to Peter, but they're rubbing off again just as quick. 

Peter steps around the fist. He grabs Flash by the neck, and hauls him back so that his body bends like a bow: forced back and held up so that he can barely stand but can't fall. 

"You're kinda dumb, you know?" he says. "I told you to run." 

Flash struggles, but he can't say anything. Not with Peter's hand clamping his jaw like that. 

"Thing is," says Peter, "I think I want to fuck you. And, Flash?" He leans forward, and says very, very quietly, "I don't actually need you to be ok with that." 

He lets go. Flash falls, partially against Peter, and it'll be a wonder if he hasn't strained anything, but maybe pain will get the point across. 

Peter reaches for his bag, and steps away, leaving Flash to pick himself up. "Yeah, so. With that in mind? You might want to stay away from me and-- do some of the other stuff I mentioned. Especially the Gwen thing. Or the cops thing. Your call." 

_Last chance, Eugene. Last warning._

"I'm not scared of you, Parker," Flash rasps, like it's a challenge. Like Peter will be _disappointed_ if Flash is too stupid to back down. 

_(And find some friends who might actually protect him)_

"Mm," Peter says, noncommittally. He glances towards the librarian desk, and sees their old geezer of a school librarian with his headphones in. His eyes are closed, and he's waving his hands vaguely in the air, like a wannabe conductor. 

_Un-fucking-believable._

"Parker!" Flash yells after him when he walks away. Peter doesn't turn around, and Flash doesn't actually come after him. Maybe he's actually gotten smart, or maybe he really has pulled a muscle. 

Either way. 

_Too bad._


	4. Chapter 4

\- - -

The kid won't stop crying.

Flash sits at a campground bench. He looks the other way, and tries not to hear. 

_Useless,_ he thinks, thoughts coming savage and sharp, _All you do is cry._

Frustration builds behind his eyes like a migraine. 

The kid sniffs. Loud. Wet. Disgusting. Flash snaps. 

There's a bottle by the bench, empty and made of glass. Flash grabs it, prepared to hurl it at the sound. _Anything_ to make the kid shut up. 

Flash. Harrison. Eugene.  
 _Thompson._

They've run together in his head, somehow. He doesn't know whose hand is on the bottle.  
But the hand on his wrist? That doesn't belong to any of them.

Flash looks up, vaguely aware of the bottle slipping. 

Parker. 

The bottle rolls away. Hits a bookshelf. Library, not park. Gray carpet instead of gray-green grass, and shoes. 

Flash looks around. He feels the chill settle in, like a man with a knife sidling up behind his back. They're surrounded. A familiar audience. How many times have they watched him? But this time he can feel the fear sticking his shirt to his skin. 

He knows them. They've got sharp teeth behind pretty smiles; he's seen them feed. Worse. He's fed them. 

But they're still hungry. 

There's an almost-touch at his face. He looks back at Parker, caught between flinching away and leaning--

\--no. He doesn't move. 

“I've got you,” Parker tells him. His voice is quiet, reassuring. And a _fucking lie_ because he's pulling back.

Flash tries to shout after him, but it's not happening. Defense and accusation choke each other out.

The audience parts around Parker, like a shoal of fish. They close again. And surge forward. 

Flash wakes up sweating, terrified, and furious. He kicks the blanket off of him, and the sweat immediately chills. 

_Shit._

His subconscious, he decides, is a sick fuck. He leans his forehead against the wall, and waits until the ache goes away. 

A sound from downstairs makes him freeze. 

_Ain't scared,_ he tells himself, for the hundredth time. And doesn't think about glass shattering against a bench. 

_”I'm sorry,”_ Harrison had said, roughly digging glass out of his hand with the bathroom tweezers, _”but you gotta fucking_ listen _to me.”_

Flash punches his pillow a few times, and watches the clock until it's time for school.

\- - -

When West grabs Flash's shoulder unexpectedly, Flash nearly breaks his hand.

“What the hell, man?” says Tavis, while West cradles his fingers and whines. 

“His fault for sneaking up on me,” Flash mutters. He scrubs the back of his hand across his eyes. The ache hasn't gone away. He's dizzy, and not in the mood for this. 

“You been acting weird,” says Tavis, eying him sidelong. “Ever since--”

_Don't say it._

It's Flash's unspoken rule. They don't talk about that. But Flash's unspoken rules don't hold quite as much power as they used to.

“My fucking _hand,_ Flash,” whines West. 

“Want me to kiss it and make it better?” Flash snaps, avoiding Tavis's gaze. 

“You want my knuckles to get real acquainted with your mouth? 'Cause I'm up for that,” West blusters.

“Not feeling so hot, ok?” Flash tells Tavis, to stop the stare. He says it as a challenge, daring Tavis to probe. Although he's not sure what he'll do if Tavis actually does. 

West shoves his phone into Flash's face. “I just wanted to show you this, asshole,”

It's a distraction. Flash is torn between irritation, and uncharacteristic gratitude. He glares at the screen. And blinks away the frown. 

“What.” 

“Video editing,” says Tavis, dismissively.

“No, man, it's real.“ West says, with the supreme confidence of someone with negative technical savvy. 

“Uh-huh,” says Tavis, unimpressed. “Guy swung a car around with his bare hands. Nobody does that. That's impossible.”

He tries to catch Flash's eye, in a, _can you believe this idiot_ kind of a way. 

Flash ignores him, and hits replay. 

West shakes his head. “No, listen. Gwen--” Flash carefully doesn't react at the mention of her name, although he feels Tavis's eyes on him again, “--says her dad is after some guy. Wears a mask like that and attacks people. Except that the people he goes after are all, like, thugs and stuff. Like a vigilante.”

“Right. And now he's, what, upgraded to a superhero traffic cop? Come on, idiot's. It's time for practice.”

Flash ignores them. He hits replay, and knocks West's hand away when he wants the phone back before the recording has played out.

“Hey, it's time to go.” West swipes at his phone. Flash jerks it out of reach, just to be an ass, but his coordination is off, and the phone slips out of his hand. 

“Fuck! What the fuck, man?“

Flash watches West scramble after the phone. The battery's popped off, and skidded across the hall.

It was an accident. But it's the kind of accident that accidentally-on-purpose happens a lot around them. But not _to_ them. An apology won't make it ok. A wisecrack might. Might get Tavis laughing at West, and on Flash's side. 

But right now, Flash is short on those. 

He slams his locker shut. Regrets it, when the sound sends a stab of pain across the nerves behind his eyes and out through his skull. 

“Whatever,” he mutters. And heads to the nurse's station. He's getting out of here. He regrets coming in the first place. West and Tavis and the rest of them, he'll deal with them when he feels less like passing out.

\- - -

_“I'm fine.”_

The voice comes from the nurses station. Flash halts in the corridor. 

_What are the odds?_

_”Luck of a Thompson,”_ Harrison would say. Time was, he'd say it with a smile. Flash understands why he stopped.

_“Fell off a bridge,”_ Parker continues. _“A small one. Skateboarding accident. No biggie.”_  
Flash unfreezes, and takes the last step forward. He gets to the door just as Parker is dropping his shirt over the damage. 

Flash barely gets a glimpse, but he's familiar with bruises. He knows what those colors feel like.

He doesn't think about backing out when Parker glances at him. It isn't thinking. It's a full-body impulse, like cringing away from a fire. But his hand locks on the door frame, and he stands frozen to the spot instead. He can't get his eyes off the bruises, even though they're covered now. 

Not like he hadn't left Parker a few. Not like other people hadn't. But that mess under Parker's shirt is a few levels above his worst, and he didn't do it. 

_So who the hell did?_

Not a bridge. Flash internally reflects the nurse's expression on that one. It's not that Parker is so bad at lying, it's just that your average six year old is better.

Flash isn't sure what he's expecting from Parker, here, with the nurse watching. But Parker? Parker smiles. “Flash. Hey, man, you look like shit.” He reaches out like he's going to clap Flash on the shoulder, but stops, his hovering hand diverted to a vague gesture. 

“Better check him out, Mrs. Blake. Looks bad.” He's edging towards the door, around Flash. “Like, seriously. Bad flu or something.”

He couldn't be more obvious about it. He wants out of the office. Flash is a convenient escape rout. 

“I'm fine,” Flash says, although he isn't. There's an ache in his head, neck, and chest. And the chills keep coming.

“No.” Parker's hand finally lands on his shoulder. “You're not.” His fingers dig in slightly, like, _That's an order._ And, to the nurse, eyebrows doing something emphatic, “He's not.” 

He pushes Flash into the office, and retreats.

By the time Flash gets his balance back, Parker is a rapidly receding set of footsteps.

\- - -

In the end, Flash takes his classes, but forgoes gym and the extra basketball practice. It's a one-eighty from his normal preferences.

At least nobody bothers him in class. 

It's not like they'll ask to borrow his notes. Especially since those notes are even more hypothetical than normal. 

_“And no, Thompson, we do not use thermite in common household cleaners--”_

–But he survives, and gets out.

Returning home early is a risk.

Flash never knows when Harrison will be active. Normally, by the time he's fooled around in the gym, maybe killed an hour on the way home, the bastard has settled down to his TV. Today, Flash is wary. 

The house looks quiet from the outside. It always does. It's a quiet kind of a street. 

As for that kid who wouldn't shut up, couldn't stop sniffling; in the end, he'd never been too loud. Nothing you'd hear from the outside. 

Flash is quiet now, too, easing the door open and listening for a second. He hears a tv, somewhere upstairs. He relaxes. 

He kicks off his shoes and heads for the refrigerator. 

And stops. 

Harrison is slumped at the table. Not upstairs. Not asleep. But that's not what's got Flash's horizon tilting the wrong way. 

“Where'd you get it,” he says, in a tone too flat to be his. 

Harrison looks up at him. There is no apology in those watery, unnaturally yellow eyes. No rage yet, either, but Flash knows that can come in half the time it takes to snap his fingers. 

Harrison's voice is clear. Quiet. That doesn't mean much, he has never been a slurry drunk. Or a loud, even at his worst. 

Just mean.

“You used to hide my liquor boy.” Harrison knocks back a mouthful, taking his shot straight from the bottle. 

Flash has seen guys try that, at parties. They think it's cool, drinking hard liquor straight from a bottle. But nobody does it like Harrison, like it's water hitting the back of his throat, and not the nastiest, cheapest liquor he can get his hands on. 

Harrison studies the bottle, now, talks to it, instead of Flash. “wasn't your place to do that. You. Doctors. Not your damned places.”

Flash wants to scream at him, but it's like the dream. His voice is locked up. Choked off by too many words.

Harrison kicks out the chair across from him, his expression not changing. The chair clatters. Bumps the wall. 

It's Flash's warning, and he knows he won't get two, but, “you gotta stop,” he says. “You--”

And there's the rage, come so quick he could have blinked and missed the transformation. But Flash isn't blinking.

Harrison hurls a mug at him. His face is contorted into taught lines, flushed red and splotched white. Flash ducks. The mug misses. Hits the living room floor and breaks. Flash hears that, but doesn't think about it, because Thompson is getting to his feet. 

He's still so damned tall. And terrifyingly well coordinated, no matter how much he drinks. 

Used to be one hell of a cop--

Used to. 

And Flash? Flash is eighteen, not eight. And, 

_”You protected him too.”_

Harrison swings. Flash isn't quite quick enough, and reels to the side, feeling like someone's taken a hammer to his cheek. He falls to the side. Catches himself on the table. 

And grabs the bottle. Because, 

_Fucking rehab._

Flash disobeys everything Harrison ever taught him. He kicks a chair into Harrison's path, and he runs. 

_Fucking doctors._

There's broken ceramic scattered across the hardwood. He remembers that when his feet find it, but doesn't stop. 

_Fucking hospital visits. And talks about livers that look like charred meat. And a serious man in a white coat saying, gravely, "No alcohol. None."_

Flash isn't running from Harrison's fists. He's running away from the need to slam the bastard's head in the refrigerator door hard, and repeatedly, until the autopsy won't have to concern itself with Harrison's liver at all. 

His shoes are by the door. He jams them on, feeling the floor shift behind him as Harrison kicks the chair away and comes after. Harrison, who's not wearing shoes, either. Maybe that's why his lunge falls short. 

Flash hits the street at a painful run, and doesn't limp to a stop until he's two blocks down, with no sign of Harrison coming after him. 

_Won't leave the house._

_Won't risk making trouble where anyone can see._

Some habits don't die, no matter how angry Harrison gets. Harrison's habits always happen behind closed doors. 

_Bastard._

Flash blinks. His eyes are watering. They're dry. No other reason. He swipes at them with the back of his hand, and realizes that he's still holding the bottle.

\- - -

A houseparent takes the nurse's call. Peter gets sent to the homes' director.

"Bridge," says Peter, which is true. There had been a bridge. And a car about to get rammed off of it. 

The man doesn't believe him. (Why does nobody _ever _believe him?).__

__"You're smart," the director says, and Peter tries not to roll his eyes, because, _duh?_ "But talent isn't everything. That mind of yours is useless if you don't apply it." _ _

__The guy keeps talking. He uses the word _"responsibility,"_ twice. It's a word he seems to like, even better than the sound of his own voice. _ _

___"You're smart so you should--"_ _ _

___"You're clever, so you have a responsibility--"_ _ _

___"You're gifted, so you owe it to—"_ _ _

__To who, exactly? Peter is intrigued. Apparently, according to this guy, the world is full of people he is indebted to._ _

__But, uh, why?_ _

__He doesn't ask. That might prolong the lecture, but, really. _Why?__ _

__He thinks about stalking that rapist. Interrupting a mugging. Breaking the fingers of a man who'd tried to beat up a hooker. And, of course, the car thing, which had been more sort of impromptu. He hadn't known he could do it, until after he had._ _

___(And the giant super-lizard? He definitely isn't going to discuss the giant super-lizard. He doesn't need another drug test, or a psychiatric evaluation, thanks anyway)._ _ _

__But he isn't doing any of this because of _"should."_ _ _

__He just hates it. Hates people getting killed for dumb reasons._ _

___(Hates remembering the news about a middle-aged man and woman, dead in a convenience store. They'd had chocolate milk in the cart. And cereal that a kid might like. A kid who'd be moving in tomorrow, because he'd just lost his parents and didn't know why)._ _ _

__"Parker," Parker tunes in, because the man sounds like he's wrapping up his spiel, "you're a brilliant young man. But with your attitude, you'll just waste your talents and make life difficult for yourself."_ _

__Peter doesn't figure that he's the one he's making life difficult for, but the man's voice actually has an edge of pleading in it. He's worried. Cares about Peter, maybe, a little, at least enough to lecture._ _

__So Parker mumbles, "Sure. Yeah, ok," instead of saying any of the things he's thinking._ _

__He does that because the guy's nice, and believes in stuff, the way Gwen does. But all Peter can feel is bored._ _

__"You've nearly graduated from our program. You'll be moving to college soon, and I'm concerned that you--"_ _

__There's a knock at the office door. The director stops talking. A harried-looking houseparent sticks her head in. "Craig? Can I talk to you for a second? It's about,"_ _

__She glances at Peter, and doesn't finish the sentence._ _

__"Sure," says the director, looking puzzled. He tells Peter to wait outside for a second. Peter does. Right outside. With his ear against the door._ _

___"A boy came to the office. Said he was Peter's friend from school,"_ _ _

__Peter frowns. He has friends? There's Gwen, but, _boy?__ _

___"I told him it was too late to visit. He smelled like a dive bar on a Friday night. I think he was limping? Wasn't really dressed for public, either. He left--"_ _ _

__Peter lets himself out. There'll be hell to pay for it later, but like the director said, he's almost graduated from their program anyway._ _

____

\- - -

Flash feels surprisingly ok. He manages to leave the grounds without getting arrested.

An accomplishment. 

He returns to the bridge where he left the bottle. A small pedestrian bridge, over a creek. Like the one Parker fell off of. Or, didn't. Because Parker is bad at lying. 

Flash reclaims the bottle. 

He's not Harrison. He's not doing anything Harrison-y at all. No. Harrison is an idiot who's going to kill himself because his liver is _so done_ with his bullshit.

Flash's liver is fine, so that's ok. 

Flash sits with his back to the railing. He closes his eyes. He's alone. 

Until he isn't. 

The presence next to his feels imaginary. An impression of something that'll be gone when he opens his eyes. 

“Hey,” says Parker, from the railing. 

_Or not._

For once, there's no shock. No sense of having touched a live wire. Flash came looking for Parker. Except he hadn't. He'd just been in the area when, alcohol, and bad ideas.

_(Even if he were sober on the subway. Even if there were a lot of other places it could have taken him)._

He didn't come looking for Parker until after the cheap tequila. That's important. 

And since he has-- hasn't-- come looking for him, it's not strange to find him. 

“'ey,” he mumbles, giving up on logic. Words are a little hard. Flash is glad about that. Harrison isn't a slurry drunk. Flash isn't like Harrison. This is proof. 

Or. Or maybe it's just that other thing that's going on in his head. The sweats and the chills and the headache from hell.

Parker slides off the railing and comes to kneel in front of him. He squints against the gloom. “Man. Who'd you piss off?” he reaches out, and pokes at the shiner on Flash's cheek. 

Flash bats his hand away. Twice. His hand goes right through on the first try, but connects on the second. The finger withdraws. Parker's eyebrows are doing that contortion act again. “Harrison, huh?”

Flash stills. 

“Wasn't for no reason,” he says, finally. “Did it to make me tough.” The phrase is easy. Beaten in like the dirt in an old carpet. 

He grabs Parker's shoulder when he starts to pull away, looks him in the eye because that's, like, showing conviction, or whatever, and Parker needs to believe this. Flash needs to believe this. It's important. “That's why.” 

Parker sets a hand over his, and detaches his fingers. “It's really not,” he says. Gently. Mercilessly. 

Flash slumps back, and lifts the bottle. Parker stops it halfway. 

“Fucking worked on you,” Flash mutters. He wants the bottle. He watches streetlight reflect in clear liquid inside. Looks like water. Tastes like a cleaning solution mixed with bottled campfire smoke. 

Tastes like--

\--Like what you're feeling when you need it. 

The silence stretches. Flash tries fitfully to tug the bottle out of Parker's hand, like it's got to work one of these times, like Parker will just forget or decide to let go. 

“Maybe,” Parker says, eventually. “That what you need to believe, Flash?” His hand shifts. Their fingers touch, briefly, then Parker's hand runs up Flash's arm to settle on his neck. Jaw. Thumb on his lower lip. Edge of a nail against his teeth. 

Flash waits for a panic that doesn't come. 

“'s what _you_ need, Parker,” he says belligerently, because it seems like a good comeback at the time. He's sure it'll make sense if he stops and thinks about it. 

Parker snorts, and lets go. 

“You are so freakin' shitfaced,” he mutters. He pries the bottle free, sniffs it. Makes a face. “Yeah, that's... Ew. I'm just gonna,”

He tosses it over the bridge. 

Now that? _That_ ain't right. Flash scowls, and kicks him in the shin. It connects, somewhat to his own surprise. Parker makes a face, and an _“Ow,”_ but both lack conviction. He stands, and hauls Flash after him. 

“Don't puke on me,” Parker warns. “Really. Don't. Ok?”


	5. Chapter 5

Flash wakes up to the smell of rain, and old mattress. 

Sunlight hurts.

“Kill me,” he mutters, burrowing his face into the mattress. Mistake. The sneeze is everything his head doesn't need right now. 

It's not so bad if he stays still. Head down. Not so much with the breathing. 

Except.

_Shit._

He sits up, too fast, and has a temporary white-out. It ends too soon, and leaves room for more thinking. 

_Didn't happen,_ he decides, trying to displace all of recent history. _Dreamed it._

Running out of the house? Sure. Going to Parker? Fine. He'd been drunk. Drunk is an excuse. 

But.

 _”Gotta piss.”_ stumbling against Parker on the way to wherever. Dark alley, and too uncoordinated to handle his own belt, and. Throwing up, after. And only Parker's intervention to stop him wearing any of that. 

“Didn't happen,” Flash tells an unsympathetic universe. 

Scaffolding shifts.

"Did," Parker disagrees, from somewhere above him. Flash looks up, to find Parker peering down at him from the top of a rickety-looking platform. The whole thing shakes when he moves, loose metal braces swaying. 

He vaults over the edge, graceful, like some freerunner in a youtube video. Lands on his feet like it's nothing. 

Flash gets to his feet. Tense. Ready. Because that's sure to make a huge difference. 

"Why am I here?" 

Parker shrugs. He's in a sweater, hood up, hands in pockets. Looks as skinny as ever, same scruffy hipster as few months back. 

Looks harmless. 

"Subway?" he offers. "And then you probably walked from the subway to the prison. Uh, that's the children's home, to you. Pretty long walk. Guess you could have gotten a cab."

"Fuck you. Not what I meant." 

Hostility is Flash's familiar pattern, and standing in what looks like an abandoned hangar, after getting his drunk-ass babysat by Peter-fucking-Parker, Flash is sticking by what little familiarity he can find. 

His foot aches with the memory of sharp ceramic and a long, bloody hike. Two of them, counting the half-remember trip here. Wherever here is. It takes all his willpower to ignore the pain, and not shift his weight. 

“Would have taken you home.” Parker shrugs again. “Haven't got one.”

_Home._

_Harrison._

Harrison, who'd never buy just one bottle if he could get two. Or six. Flash raises shaking hands to his head, and presses, trying to contain a building pressure. 

_Could be dying._

_Could be fucking dead._

Harrison would never call his own ambulance, and Flash's _don't care_ of the the night before isn't holding up. It never does. 

“Uh. Flash?”

There's a steadying hand on his arm. Flash shoves it away with every ounce of violence he can find, and it goes, held up, like _”Fine, then, be that way”_. 

Parker gives him distance. Watches his implosion like it's a vaguely interesting chemistry experiment. Watching a blue solution turn red, or something, and getting _why_. Not just colors and a test on Tuesday. 

Not normal, caring about school like that. 

Not normal to _care._

Flash looks up. “Phone.”

“What?”

“Phone.” Flash thrusts his hand out. He left his in his bag, by the door-- god-- yesterday. 

“Magic word?”

“Abra-ca-fucking-dabra? Give me your phone, Parker or--” No. No time. “ _\--Please,_ ”  
He spits it out, biting off the sarcasm. Parker hesitates, but shrugs. A phone drops into Flash's hand. It's a cheap-ass model, tiny keypad. There are ten missed voice mails. 

Flash ignores them and dials home. 

He gets an answering machine. “Pick up, asshole,” he tells it. Squeezes his eyes shut, and presses a palm to his forehead. “Dad. Come on.”

He's almost given up before he hears the click. A rattle. Heavy breathing in the mouthpiece. 

“Eugene. I swear to god, boy, if you don't get your ass home _right now_ ,”

Harrison's doesn't sound dead. Not even like he needs an ambulance. Just hungover, and as much of a bastard as ever. 

Flash snaps the phone shut, and stares at it. Relief. Rage. In that order, but it's rage that sends the phone flying across the hanger to hit the far wall. Second one he's broken in as many days, but this time it's perfectly deliberate. 

“Huh,” Parker says, “Nothing like gratitude.” 

“Shut up.”

“Really?” Parker is doing the 'stare-at-Flash-like-he's-an-alien' thing again. He glances at his phone. It's in two pieces. “You broke my phone.”

Flash sputters out a laugh that's somewhere between fury and hysterics. “Broke your _phone?_ You think that's all I owe you, Parker? You--” 

Took a sledgehammer to his world. Pulled him apart, tied the tendons of his soul into knots, and left him like that. Could have handled broken bones. Bruises. Anything except what Parker did instead. 

“Yeah,” Parker waves a dismissive hand. “But, my phone. I let you borrow it, and you break it. Who _does_ that?” 

_Someone who's going to start feeling sorry about it in the near never._

“Know what?” Flash stalks over to the phone, trying not to limp. He picks up the pieces. “You're right. I'm sorry. Let me just,” he snaps the casing off, twists it out of shape, and tosses it towards a corner. He cracks what's left of the phone in half, and lets it fall. 

“Wow.” says Parker. “Yeah. Ok. You know what? You're way cuter when you're shitfaced.”

Flash stands with his hands balled into fists. Memory waves a red flag at him.

_”'S my dad. 'S my dad, ok? Parker, I can't. 'S not like I can just. I can't.”_

He'd talked. _Rambled._ he doesn't remember about what. Anything. Everything. 

_Shit._

The anger drains out, leaving him hung-over, dizzy, and in pain. 

He needs to sit. He fights it. No matter how much pride he loses to Parker, it just makes him more determined to keep whatever pretenses he's got left. Finally, though, the balance shifts. 

He swears, and drops, back to the wall. He kicks off his shoe, pretending not to feel Parker's gaze. Trying to pretend Parker isn't there. The sole is bloodstained. It has stopped bleeding, scabs forming across the cuts, but he can tell by the feel that there's still slivers of ceramic in there.

Parker edges closer. “What happened to your foot?”

“Fuck off.” 

Parker doesn't. He kneels, watching Flash try to extract the splinters with blunt nails. No success. Lots of pain. Maybe that's why Parker lets it go on for a while before saying, mildly, 

“I got tweezers. You want tweezers?”

Flash stops, stares down at the blood under his nails, and doesn't answer. Parker gets up. Flash hears creaking from the scaffolding. Parker comes back a few moments later, and sits in front of him. 

He pulls Flash's foot into his lap. Holds it there when Flash tries to wrench it away. “This is gonna be a lot less painful if you don't jerk around.”

Flash drops his head back against the hangar wall with a clang that reverberates. Through the wall, yes, but mostly through his own skull. That's fine. It's a distraction from what Parker is doing.

“I got a little carried away,” says Parker, four minutes in, when Flash has his eyes squeezed shut and his teeth locked down over the noises that want out. 

Flash opens his eyes, and stares at him over his lower lids, not bothering to lift his head.

“What?”

“Y'know. Before. Locker room.”

The tweezers jab into broken skin. Flash hisses. 

“Carried away? That what you call it?” He bounces his skull against the wall again, counterpoint to the pain.

“Stop it,” says Parker. 

“Sure. Give me the tweezers.”

“No.” 

They fall into a silence. Parker breaks it with, “People have a lot of nerve endings in their feet. That's why this sucks so much.” 

Flash glowers at him. And falters, when Parker swipes a thumb across unbroken skin in the arch of his foot. An involuntary twitch seizes a tendon in his leg. Parker repeats the motion. 

“Knock it off.” Flash kicks at him with his free foot. Parker fends him off.

“That works on you?” Like it's a smart-ass question in class. Like he's taking _notes_. Although possibly not the ones teacher intended.

Flash straightens up, arms braced under him for leverage, ready to make a fight out of this. He's brought up short against Parker's smile. One-sided, brows quirked, playing some game that's all mischief. 

Flash thinks about those trickster gods. About some teacher saying about how “trick” didn't have to be harmless. How a trickster's sense of fun could get pretty damned nasty. The teacher had explained this to a class of high-school students, like it was supposed to surprise them. Since they'd all survived middle school, it didn't. 

“It's annoying,” Flash says, which sounds better than, _I'm really freakin' ticklish, ok?_

“Just annoying?” Parker's thumb traces a circle in Flash's inner arch.

Flash twitches, and makes another attempt to kick Parker's hand away. 

Parker pulls. It's not a tug, nothing quick. He just pulls, and Flash, despite his best efforts, slides. He ends up on his back. Parker's hand trails up his leg, ending up somewhere above his knee and staying there, pinning him in place. 

Flash is acutely aware of Parker's knees between his legs. How he can't close them without ending up on his lap. 

His inconvenient memory kicks up a picture; pinning Parker face-down outside the school. Holding him there with a hand on the back of his neck and pretending it's all a joke.

And it was. Just not a good one. 

He sits up to get Parker on an eye-level. 

“What do you think you're doing, Parker?”

Parker shrugs. “What do you think I'm doing?”

Flash feels his breath coming short. Can't even it out. 

“No,” he says, “No _way_ am I letting you--”

“Ok. You don't have to.”

“What,”

“You don't have to let me do anything.” Parker smiles. Flash recognizes the look on his face. _knows_ , because it belonged to him, first. “You can try to stop me any time you want.”

There's no anger in Parker's face. No vengeance. This isn't payback. The realization ties Flash's stomach into knots, because Parker is having _fun._

Parker's hands shifts to Flash's hips. Flash swears as, for the second time, his balance is thrown off and he's on his back. This time Parker leans over him, and there's no way to come back up without knocking heads. 

“I'm not complaining,” Parker says, “but, jeez, Flash, how dumb are you? I _tell_ you what I want to do you, so you come looking?” He shifts, his thigh a blunt pressure at Flash's ass.  
“I could get a little confused about that. About what you're asking for.”

Flash searches a face he could never read. Not before it turned into a mirror. 

“Stop it,” he says. It's hardly a voice. 

“Mixed signals, buddy. Mixed signals.”

Flash laughs at him. You could call it a laugh. He shuts his eyes. 

“You won't,” it's a snarl. It's almost an accusation. 

“I won't?”

“No.” Flash opens his eyes. He's sure. He's pissed off, scared, and humiliated, but he's sure. Parker will posture. Threaten. Scare. Make Flash panic and beg, if he can. But the locker room? That wasn't about sex. That was about power. And--

No.

Flash isn't sure why it flips his switch to rage, that certainty that he's being toyed with. It's not worse than being victimized. It's not, but--

But he's been a victim. He's taken the abuse. And told himself it made him tough. This? This is the opposite of feeling tough. This is being a mouse in a cage. A toy in a toybox. He swings. Puts his full body into it, coming off the ground and head-butting Parker hard a second after Parker catches his fist. 

He doesn't stop. Parker is fully occupied pinning limbs while Flash tries to slam him with anything's he's got free, forehead or knee or elbow.

Parker rolls him over. Pins him face down, but that doesn't stop Flash getting him a crack in the nose with the back of his head when Parker leans down too far. 

“Ow! Christ. Ok. Ok. Happy now?”

Flash pants. Feels something warm on the back of his neck-- blood?-- And Parker's letting go one of his arms to swipe at his face. Flash tries a one-armed push-up with Parker on his back. He's exhausted. It doesn't work. 

But there's some slack, and, when he tries, Parker lets him roll over to face him. 

They stay like that, Flash glaring while Parker continues to kneel over him. Flash briefly considers another try at kneeing him in the balls. Doesn't. He's out of energy, and more sick than angry, now, with the rage expended.

“Go to hell. I don't care. I don't.” He can't articulate what he doesn't care about. But if _'do you care'_ were a yes/no on a polygraph, he knows he'd fail, hard. 

Flash raises his hands, but doesn't rub at his eyes, because breaking eye contact would be _losing_ , somehow. He presses his knuckles to his temples, instead, trying to hold down a thought, and knowing it doesn't work like that.

Parker slowly drops his arm from his face. It leaves a smear of blood across his upper lip. Looks familiar. A look Flash has caused before. The vaguely stunned expression, and the searching look, as Parker comes to some understanding that Flash doesn't want him to have: that's familiar too. But it's never scared him so badly before. 

Parker plants a bloodstained hand by Flash's head, and leans down. 

“You should get up. You should _go_.” His eyes are dark. Blown wide, like he's high on something. “And, yeah. I'd let you. But you. You're not going to, are you?”

He's close enough to be asking for another bloody nose, but they're past that. On to some further island of insanity. 

Flash breaks eye contact, gaze dropping somewhere below Parker's chin, unable to lift further. He sees the grin. Hears the incredulous laugh, because, 

_(“You want this. You fucking want this.”)_

Parker doesn't say it this time. Maybe he knows the only answer Flash can give, _No_. 

And maybe they both know that it's almost--

_almost--_

a lie.

\- - -

Flash isn't sure what it means; having sex and violence translate to the same place in his mind. And finding some kind of sick comfort in the familiarity.

He's got a hand in Parker's hair, teeth on his lips. Doesn't actually care, now, if he's good at kissing, because that isn't what this is. 

This is frustration. 

This is remembering a scrawny kid who couldn't fight back. Who would always be vulnerable. Always available.

(Always _untouchable_ , because of who and what Flash was, and who and what Parker was).

This is looking for that kid. And finding someone else. 

Parker brushes off the attempt to dominate. He shoves Flash away, and down, hand over his mouth, and reddened lip curled in a sardonic smile. 

“Jeeze. How dumb are you?” he repeats, in a whisper. Despite the words, it's an incidental insult. Parker doesn't sound scornful. He sounds, something. Awed. Approving. 

_Victorious._

His eyes sharpen. Dumb phrase, one Flash never got, until now. It's in the focus. Narrow and hard and _intense_

Has Flash wanting to look away. And breathing sharp and shallow when he doesn't, like trying to stare down a wild animal, when eye-contact is challenge and they both know the balance of power. 

Parker can be teeth and claws and _pain_ if he wants to. 

But that's not the scariest alternative. 

“Gonna,” Parker starts, and stops, eyes flickering across Flash, taking time to think. “Gonna take this slow,” he decides.

Flash huffs. Tries to bite the hand over his mouth. 

“Real slow,” Parker confirms. “Make you want to come. Not let you. Stuff like that. And,”

Flash is trying to pry Parker's fingers off of his mouth with both hands, but Parker ignores him, reaching over his head and rummaging around in a heap of scrap. He pulls back, bringing a coil of cut cable with him. It's insulated wire, very thick, and his eyes flicker between it and Flash. 

_Fuck._

The scaffolding. Of course, it has got to be the scaffolding. Parker can't just tie him up like a normal freak. 

Flash's hands are over his head, wrapped in wire and tied to a joint in the bracing. The thing creaks when he pulls, feeling anything but stable.

Wrenching at the wire gets him nothing but bruised wrists. Swearing at Parker gets him even less. 

_“Uh, yeah? I kind of can?”_ Parker says, in response to a,

_”Just because you can't take me with my fucking hands free--”_

“But, why would I? I mean, this,” Parker tilts his head, admiring his handiwork from a few paces away, “This is a good look for you.”

“Asshole,” Flash mutters. He tugs at the wire as Parker shifts closer. 

Parker's touch is curious. Experimental. Like when his thumb traced a circle on the inside of Flash's foot. 

Flash looks for a counterpoint in an edge of bracing, a pain below his ribs. He tries not to notice how his own breathing changes when Parker shoves his shirt up over his chest, and runs a thumb down his ribs. 

“Hey, so, I'm thinking,” Parker wraps his hands around the back of Flash's thighs, and pulls. He settles between his legs, trying out the angle through two layers of fabric.

“What do you think?” Parker gives an experimental thrust. Shifts position, and does it again, while Flash hangs in his grip. “Like this. Think I can get all the way in?”

Flash can't. Can't even believe that's possible. 

Parker gives another experimental thrust, and Flash's is forced a step closer to the reality of his helplessness. Panic starts clawing around his heart again, some sense of intense suffocation making him need to get away.

But there's nowhere to go. There's just the wire at his wrist's and Parker, and no floor to ground himself. Just a grip under his thighs, and the realization that Parker is hard through his jeans. 

That makes it real. Now he can imagine it. Held up, no leverage. Forced open. Violated. No pretense at power or reciprocity.

_Can't._

The word doesn't get out, just crowds up his head. Can't come back from that. Can't survive it. 

“Hey.” The hold on him shifts, one arm to hold him in place while the other slaps his cheek. “Hey, hey, no. None of that. Breathe.”

Flash doesn't realize he's stopped, that the suffocating feeling is an actual lack of air, until his lungs unlock. He pants, can't stop the edge of a sob. But there's heat rising in his face. Shame and fury. And more of it, when he registers the pressure of his cock against Parker's abdomen.

Fucking miracle he's got any blood to spare. 

Parker's hand has gone gentle along the side of his face. Thumb soothing at his jawline. 

Breathing heavily, Flash turns his head away. He can do that much. Can't do anything when the hand follows him, though. 

“Stop it.” It's a wrecked whisper, horrifying him, another self-betrayal that shows he can't trust anything, not his mind, and not his body. The sting of tears is worse. 

“Not gonna hurt you,” says Parker. Which is a goddamned lie, because Flash knows that there is pain in this, and going to be more. But the pain he can handle. 

Not-- not the thumb rubbing a gentle circle on his cheek, gruesome parody to whatever is going on between them. 

Parker lets him down, slowly. The hand that was holding him presses at his hip. Soothing. Steadying. _Infuriating._ He leans in, jaw to jaw, lips to ear. “You're fine. Not gonna make this bad, ok?”

He already has. 

The gentle breath in Flash's ear is just making it worse. 

But there's a big step between seeing your own destruction, and admitting it. Besides, with his feet on the ground, Flash starts breathing normal. It leaves room for the anger. 

He jerks his head to the side, knocking Parker's mouth away. 

“Stop,” he says, with more conviction. “Not like that. That's not-- this isn't-- we aren't--” He won't put it into words.

“Ok,” says Parker, placating. “Sure.”

Flash knew that tone. It's ironically close to the tone he uses on girls who want “I love you” halfway in, when, for him, stopping doesn't feel like an option. That tone means, 

_Sure. Yes to everything, can we keep going now?_

Parker's hands drift. Not smooth and practiced, something from rote memorization, like Flash always tries to be, but experimental. Fascinated. A kid playing with a new console controller and determined to figure out what all the buttons do. 

He bends in again, mouths at Flash's neck. 

“Parker--”

And the feel of lips against his throat turns the name into a whine, not the anger he'd tried for. His hips make an abortive move forward. Parker notices. Either that, or the encouraging hand on his ass is a coincidence. Either way, he can feel the taut fabric of Parker's jeans through his loose sweatpants, and the sensation is doing things to his head. 

“I got you,” Parker says, against his neck. The phrase sends a chill down Flash's spine. Despite the flush under his skin, he feels something cold, a chilling current taking the strength out of him. 

“Then,” _Fuck._ “Hurry up.” 

He pretends that this isn't a surrender. That he isn't admitting anything. 

“Nah.” Parker pulls back, smile gone sharp again. “I told you. I wanna take my time.”

\- - -

The world goes away. Parker doesn't miss it. He laughs, silent and incredulous, as Flash's head drops against his shoulder.

He's pretty sure he's been cursed out with every derogatory term in Flash's vocabulary. But that was ten minutes ago. Now, all Flash gives him are sounds. Frantic, pleading, guttural _sounds._ Words only come out as half-coherent accidents on the theme of _”Please.”_

“Yeah,” says Parker. “Soon, ok?” which is a lie, because he's nowhere near ready to end this. 

Parker wishes Flash hadn't broken his phone. If he had it, he'd take a video. 

_(Flash wouldn't want to let him._

_He'd duck his head to the side, coherent enough for that, trying to hide his face and jaw shut tight and eyes squeezed shut-- which would look nice, but._

_Peter would tell him to look. Promise to let him come, if he does. And the strangled moan would turn into a whimper, and Flash would turn his head and, open his eyes, lust and fear and shame--)_

Lost in the fantasy, Peter barely catches Flash in time, fingers squeezing the base of his cock.

Flash lets out a strangled scream, undercut by a sob as his entire body shudders and convulses in frustration. 

_Not used to this,_ Peter thinks, because Flash has always been all alpha-male, or at least he's pretended to be whatever he thinks an alpha-male is. Being made to wait, helpless, at somebody's else's direction; he's never had this before. And it's taking him to pieces. 

“I can't,” Flash gets out, panting hoarsely. “I can't. _Please._ ”

Parker grins over his shoulder. “Ok,” he says, fingers rubbing deliberately at the spot inside of Flash that has him jerking against his hand, begging for friction. “Ok. Sure.”

...And squeezes the base of Flash's cock again, deliberate, when he hears Flash's breath hitch. 

The reaction has him laughing again, breathless, as Flash chokes on frustration and dissolves against him. There's wet on the cheek against his neck. Flash is crying for real, now, pure frustration, and the power of that is beyond intoxicating. 

Until Peter hears the litany under Flash's ragged sobs. 

_”I'm sorry,”_ Flash is saying, over and over, in the most broken voice Peter has ever heard. 

Something twists inside Peter. And, like a phantom pain in a missing limb, he remembers what guilt feels like. He goes still, hyper-aware of the weight of Flash's head on his shoulder. The constriction of Flash's body around his fingers. The thrill that remains, even now, in the awareness of the power he has over the body in front of him.

But, Flash. Somewhere in that fucked up head of his, he thinks that this is punishment. 

_And that's--_

Not what this. Whatever this is, it's not. That. 

The pain in Flash's breath brings Parker back to the present. He doesn't say a word, just gently moves his hand until Flash comes with a cry that's muffled in Peter's neck. He's shaking. Damp cheeks, and a quiver in his breath that doesn't go away.

Peter reaches over him, and undoes the wire from the bracing. He waits for Flash to come back, start swearing at him, all anger and fists and _loud._

He's not prepared for the way Flash folds into him, instead. His face stays buried in Peter's shoulder, like he never plans to show it again. 

Guilt twinges again, odd and distant and unfamiliar. Peter raises a hand, rubs uncertainly at the buzzed stubble on Flash's head. “You, uh. You did good?” he tries. It's the voice and the touch that had set Flash off, earlier. The way he hates being touched and talked to. But it's doing something else now. Settling him down. Making his breathing even out. 

And Peter--

Peter can't stop the twitch. The small, triumphant smile, a sense of victory undercutting that part of him that's screaming that something is _wrong,_ here, that Flash thinks he's being paid back for his douchebaggery shenanigans, and that that's one hell of a fucked-up way to think.

But. 

He rubs his knuckles gently against the back of Flash's head, and Flash lets him. 

“You did good,” he murmurs again, with more confidence this time. “Good job, Eugene.”

Flash's breath hitches, halfway to a sob. 

Parker remembers what guilt feels like. But it doesn't stop the smile. Or the way he's still achingly hard, with a head full of things he wants to do to a guy who's too damned stupid to run.


	6. Chapter 6

_"After what happened,"_ and _"If you need anything."_

Flash feels the weight of his cast, heavy against his chest. He lets the phrases slide off of him like sympathy and sideways glances. 

"I'm fine," he says, too loud. The principal and the social worker continue to watch him, while the sweat chills on his spine. "Can I go to class?" he asks. 

First time he's asked that. Ever. 

At least he doesn't mean it because he heads in a wrong direction. 

_Missing. Suspected runaway._

Gone from home and school, but that's not... not as much of an emergency as the paperwork indicates. Not for a kid like Parker, who has disappeared before. 

There's a couple making out in front of Parker's locker. 

Flash shoves them out of the way left-handed, distantly aware of a pair of startled squawks and a multi-limbed crash, and jerks the door open.

He's lucky, for once. The notebook is right on top of the mess in Parker's locker. It only takes a few seconds to find the gashed page: a long, dark line left from where he'd tugged the notebook out from under Parker's hands, that day in the library. 

_Spider bite._ he'd told the team, clapping a hand over the red mark on his neck.

Shit. _Shit._

Flash drops his head into the palm of his hand, and laughs. 

He doesn't hear the approaching footsteps. Might not have stopped if he did. 

"Thompson?"

\- - -

This time it's a cop occupying the second seat, not the resident social worker. The principle looks worried instead of sympathetic.

It's an improvement. 

It's familiar. 

"Do you know where Parker is?" the cop asks, after she's asked some other things, and said some other things, like _"You're not in trouble with us, honey, we'd just appreciate if you could answer some questions."_

"No," says Flash. Not a lie, but he wouldn't pass a polygraph, either. 

"Why were you in his locker?"

Flash is hyper-aware of the folded sheet nestled in his pocket. 

"...Just, wanted to look," he mumbles. "Wasn't thinking."

They might believe that. The last bit, anyway. People usually do, for some reason. 

There's a pause. He doesn't want to look up. This is a lady who has probably seen enough liars to recognize one, eye contact or no, but.

"Is Parker a friend of yours?"

_(Fingers gripping his hips and a knee under his thigh, and--)_

Flash stares fixedly at the desk. 

_Not exactly._

\- - -

"Better?" Parker had asked, back in the hangar.

 _Is that a real fucking question?_ Flash meant to say it, but the words wouldn't happen. He tried for something easier.

_Fuck you._

Nope.

The word he finally got came out wrong. Cracked and sounding like a question.

"Parker--" No. He forced the sentence to stop before it could get any worse.

"Yeah," said Parker. His teeth landed on Flash's neck, teasing. Light, like his voice.

Flash finally understood where he was: on his knees, with no memory of getting there. He opened his eyes and found his head on Parker's shoulder, which, _what the actual fuck,_ but moving was harder than making words.

He looked down instead.

Parker was balanced on the balls of his feet, steady as some kind of ninja-shaped monolith. His hand was around the back of Flash's neck, pressure and comfort and _why_.

“Hey, Flash,” said Parker, and the trace of _dude-I-just-had-the-best-idea-ever_ in his tone was all the warning Flash needed to know how entirely wrong this had gone, “We can make this a thing.”

Flash got it. He did. Because it's amazing where a guy's mood can go when his dick gets hard.

Didn't mean a thing, but, this?

_This?_

"There's no this," he mumbled.

He wanted to explain. Wanted to tell Parker exactly how far off the deep end he'd gone, but he couldn't. There weren't any references. Land was a distant memory for both of them, and Flash didn't know shit about marine trenches except that they're Really Fucking Deep.

Parker nudged him, the movement translating as a slight shrug against Flash's forehead. “Can't hear you, buddy. What's up?”

Flash got a fist on Parker's chest and pushed away. The hand around the back of his neck didn't stop him.

It didn't leave, either.

“There's no this,” Flash rasped, louder this time. He jerked his head up, almost hitting Parker's nose before he realized how close the other boy was. Parker backed off, but not by much.

"Buddy,"

"Shut up. Stop." _Stop calling me that._

"There kind of is." Parker touched Flash's stomach. Drew an idle line through the drying mess; pressing harder when muscles twitched under his touch. "I can do more," he said, dark eyes following the motion of his hand. It took Flash a few heartbeats to realize that Parker was making an offer, not a threat. 

Right. Because the experience he'd just gone through was, what? Merchandise on the bargains rack? 

_Mind-blowing orgasm. Discount. Side effects may include panic attacks, mindfuck, self-hate, and selective amnesia. At the cheap, cheap price of whatever soul you got left._

_And, hell, that's practically free, amirite?_

Flash flinched away from the touch. 

Parker went still. He looked up and caught Flash's eyes on him. His smile came lopsided and wry, like they were in this together, and the joke was on both of them. 

"Tell me to stop," he said. 

Flash stared at him, confused, looking for the trick, thinking about Parker saying _"Yes"_ and _"Sure"_ while holding him on the edge.

_Ask for something you won't give? Because that's-- that's what begging is, isn't it?_

_Is it so friggin' fun to hear?_

Parker sighed. He reached for Flash's clothes, which were mostly a tangled mess around his knees, and tugged. "Tell. Me. To. Stop," he repeated, while Flash swatted his hand away and finished the motion himself. "You need to, buddy. You really do. And then you need to go, and not..." he made a gesture, a sort of half wave between the two of them.

Parker started to rise. Turning away. Again.

Flash snapped, because, no, _fuck you,_ no. He tackled Parker. They landed in a sprawl across the concrete. 

"Shut up," said Flash, with the kind of calm you only get on the far side of incoherent rage. "Shut-- stop-- where the-- _where_ do you get off on telling me what I need--"

Parker made a noise and grabbed his shoulder. Hard. It took a moment for Flash to work out why, until he started to extricate himself, and felt the drag of his thigh between Parker's legs. He paused, completely derailed. 

Parker had been hard, sure, but he'd thought--

Actually, he hadn't. Wondering what Parker had done with his boner hadn't been anywhere on his mental horizon. 

_The whole time?_

Flash looked down. He was completely unprepared for closed eyes and the starting flush, or the edge of a whine in Parker's voice. 

His own breath caught. New sweat started in the palms of his hands: too many years of obsession and denial twisting up to screw him over. 

Even then. Even with every barrier between them violently broken, _he couldn't._

_Shoving Parker against a locker and leaning in._

_Hours later with a shuddering breath and the cum over his fingers, trying to pretend it was about something else. Anything else._

_Temporary relief in the laughter: a couple of guys at his back to witness his paper-thin normalcy._

The feelings looped: desperate, sickened, and panicky, catching him up in a sustained hell. 

His thoughts skittered around the old fantasies. Bits and flashes and fear: an unnamed face with messy hair, pictured vaguely. Imagining the constriction around his cock and knowing he'd choke to death on the sick self loathing if he ever acknowledged the impulse. 

Bits and flashes, but enough. 

He was half-mast again by the time Parker's eyes opened and took him in at a glance.

Parker reached up and palmed his crotch, once, eyes flickering down between them to follow the motion with an almost detached sense of curiosity. 

Flash choked, his arm giving out and dropping him to his elbow. He barely noticed the shock of pain. 

Parker's hands shifted to Flash's hips, and he rolled up into him. Once. Twice, before Flash gave out and was brought down on top of him; Parker's hands curling around to grip his ass.

"You--" said Parker, and stopped. Squeezed. Spoke again, on a more collected tone. "How much clearer do I gotta make myself, buddy? What part of _'I want to fuck you'_ did you not get?"

Flash writhed, knee braced on the concrete and not taking him anywhere. Parker rolled his hips again, slow and deliberate, controlled breathing underlying Flash's choked-off gasp. 

"Want me to spell it out better?" Parker rolled them over and ground down. Flash's self-control snapped with a series of sharp, shallow thrusts upwards.

Parker stilled him with a hand on his hip, continuing to move at his own pace. 

"I want to," Parker's voice slipped out of control for a minute. Then it was back, low and deadly, "Bend you over something. Chair. Wall. _Desk_. Don't care. Leash you to it. Collar and everything. Spread your legs and tie them like that, so you can't close them. Tie your hands behind your back. Fuck you like that, for as long as I can keep it up, and that's-- that's pretty long. Then leave you like that, until I can get hard, and do it again."

Flash tried to tell Parker to shut up, to stop talking, that he didn't need this shit in his head, but it was hard. And maybe struggling like that, trying to cheat Parker's suppressing grip, was going to give him the wrong idea, but, _fuck._

Parker lifted off of him entirely, and pinned his legs by hooking toe to inner thigh, knees turned out against Flash's hips. Flash struggled. His fingertips brushed Parker's thighs, stuttering between an impulse to push him off, and the need to pull him down again. 

Parker stared down at him, moving slow. So slow, like somebody half-tranced on a high. 

"Or maybe," Parker's hands were on his own fly, popping the button on his jeans with the flick of a thumb. He drew himself out, cock nestled in the palm of a motionless hand. Watching, like what he was doing to Flash was still, _still_ more interesting than getting himself off. "Maybe I leave your hands free. Maybe that's better? Let you get hard like this, and make you _stay_ hard like this, until you do what I want. Whatever I want. Suck my cock. Fuck yourself with your own fingers. Anything."

Flash jerked at empty air. He shut his eyes, trying to block out Parker's stare, and reached for himself. Parker caught his wrist. Got his other one, too, neatly swiping both when Flash reached to contest the grip. He held both in his left hand. 

Flash opened his eyes and stared, momentarily distracted by another _not possible_ , but his eyes jerked back to Parker as the bastard leaned forward over him. His right hand was back on his cock, steadily jerking himself off and making Flash, pinned and helpless to do anything about his own situation, watch. 

If he made any sound when he came, Flash never heard it. He went rigid with disbelief when the come hit him, flinching at the sensation, then staring at nothing, unable to believe what was pooling in the hollows of his stomach and chest.

Parker gripped his right hand and guided it down. Flash realized where that was going too late, hands already curled obediently around his cock before he registered what was happening. Parker kept it there, fingers over his, trapping them in place. 

"Do it," he said, and squeezed encouragingly. 

_Fuck._

Flash shut his eyes, realizing with a breaking rush of humiliation that they were wet at the edges, tear-tracks already snaking down the sides of his face. His hand moved under Parker's guidance. Not the frantic motions that would have happened a moment ago, but with a shamed slowness.

It still didn't take long. 

Parker let go. He pressed a sticky hand to Flash's chest and leaned down. 

"There's a this," he said, nodding his head at the mess they'd made. At Flash. "Unless you stay away from me? There's definitely a this."

Flash kept his eyes closed.

_I know, bastard._

_I've known longer than you._

Was just smart enough not to admit it. 

_Smart. Sure._

Flash opened his eyes. 

Parker looked back at him. Looked confused.

For once in his life, Eugene Thompson felt like the smartest guy in the room.

\- - -

"I'll be back," Peter said.

Five minutes later, he handed his last ten dollar bill to a gas station cashier, and became broke. Possibly homeless.

He stopped on the pavement outside of the store, rain beading on the bag he held. He'd head back to the hangar. They'd clean up, and. And something. 

Peter held his free hand up in front of his eyes and stood there, like a freak, staring at it. He wondered if it should be shaking. Would a normal person shake? Out of guilt, or shock, or nerves?

There was something in the way Flash had looked at him, after, that made unease curl around the back of his thoughts, stealthy and never quite in his line of sight. But he couldn't focus on it. Thinking about Flash right now was--

Was triumph and excitement and a deep breath made tangible under the palm of his hand. Dizzying as falling towards concrete from twenty stories up and knowing that he'd cheat gravity. 

Peter was uncomfortable, soaked to his skin, and probably due to be kicked out of the only home he really remembered. But as usual, none of his feelings were where he expected them. He felt great. 

The world had never felt more real. 

But reality-- 

Reality was an empty hangar.

\- - -

"Son," said Harrison.

Harrison. Awake. On the couch, front-lit by the t.v.

Flash dropped the card he'd used to force their ancient lock. He stood still in the open doorway, his back to the thin protection of a public street.

Part of him started to shrink, curling up inside of him like a plasmo-something'd cell in a hyper solution. Like a stray in a cage.

Like--

But there was some other part, new and bitter, which had come awake with a snarl under Parker's confused stare.

Harrison was wearing a pair of old pajama bottoms and a stained wife-beater. There was fat over his muscle: and thinning hair going to bald, and flesh hanging off of high cheeks like melted wax.

Flash was supposed to duck his head now and mumble an apology. Supposed to stand still for whatever punishment Harrison handed out, and then the dressing down while his head reeled and the new bruises ached.

That was what was supposed to happen. He'd been here enough times to know.

“Yeah,” he said, instead. Too loud: showing off every crack and waver in his voice. “That's me.”

Harrison paused for a second. Then continued, like he hadn't heard the note of defiance.

“Get your ass in here,” he said, “and shut the damned door.”

Flash edged forward. His hand had better self-preservation instincts. It stayed locked on the door frame, holding him back.

_Why couldn't you have been asleep?_

Just once, when it mattered.

_Why couldn't you not be here?_

The thought made a wrong shape in his head. Not what he meant. Not what he wanted.

Just the best they could hope for.

The realization came with an impulse: sick, and hurt, and ready to laugh at anything. Flash stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. It had nothing to do with obedience. 

He stared at Harrison: barely-visible in the gloom, and his memory filled in details that hadn't been there for years.

Harrison stood up, unfolding like a worn-out jack-in-the-box: terror in slow-motion.

“I told you to come home,” Harrison said, voice flat and deadly. “where were you?”

_Honest answer?_

Sure. Because honesty, 

_(The motion of his hips against a grip he can't beat: held down and broken and_ needing _it)_

Talking about how a Thompson's boy had been somebody's bitch, somebody _else's_ bitch, that would fix everything. 

Harrison took another step forward, closing the distance. They kept an old wooden chair by the front door: a convenient place to drop stuff when they came in. Harrison kicked it, making it rattle back against the wall. “I asked you a damned question.”

Flash stood thinking about brown eyes and a crooked smile that said _"None of this matters."_

He thought, 

_Anything._

Anything to feel that way and not be afraid anymore. 

Flash took a breath. His head went clear, like sunlight through a windshield in the half-second before a crash. 

“Fuck you,” he said.


	7. Chapter 7

_"Don't provoke him,"_ his mother would say. And, _"Listen to your father."_

And, in so, so many different ways, few of which needed words, _"Your fault."_

She's a gray shadow in his memory, now. Gone. Took his kid sister, and left.

Because he'd.

He'd been angry, at a woman who never did anything until afterwards. And then, only maybe.

He hadn't wanted 'maybe' that day. Didn't want to be told it was his fault, while she slapped a bandaid on the worst cut, and left the rest to bleed. He struck her hand away. Shoved the kit off the table. Band-aids and gauze and iodine tumbling to the floor: he can still see that in his mind's eye. Can hear her say, 

_"Just like you're father."_

First time she'd criticized Harrison, even obliquely. 

_Should have paid attention to that. Should have..._

Didn't. 

He was twelve. He was angry. He slammed the door in her face and went to school. 

Never saw her again. 

Harrison stopped needing excuses, no matter how thin, to lay into Flash. He stopped saying _“For your own good,”_ and, _“Did it to make you tough.”_

But, Flash, Flash didn't stop believing it. Not where it counted, down deep where you don't need words, because it _was all they fucking had._

And now, they didn't even have that.

\- - -

Plenty of kids get told to stand up to bullies. A few even tried that with Flash, which was fine.

_He just shoved them harder._

Flash expected Harrison to hit him. 

Which, Harrison did. 

With the chair. 

Flash instinctively tried to block Harrison's downswing with his arm. It took as much of the force as it could. His head took the rest. 

He hit the ground. Harrison kicked him.

There were words in the violence, a soundtrack of _"Coward,"_ and _"bitch,"_ and.

And _"fight back."_

Obey. And get hit for being pathetic.

Or,

_Stand up. Face me. Fight back, so I can hit you harder._

Flash curled in on himself. He tried to bring up an arm to shield his face, but everything below his elbow was pain. 

_This._

_This isn't._

Time wasn't working. Slow-fast-slow. Bits missing, with only the pain as a horrible constant. 

Sweat ran into his eyes. 

Or maybe.

_Chair to the head, head to the floor, eggs falling out of a carton and smashing._

Maybe not sweat.

He tried to kick himself away. His bad arm dragged, useless.

Harrison stepped on his wrist.

\- - -

Something cracked.

Against all probability it wasn't Flash, although for a second he thought it was.

Then cold air hit his face, and light, and the door he'd shut was,

Wasn't Anywhere.

The pressure went from his wrist. So did Harrison, stumbling back. His feet tangled in broken chair. He fell. 

Flash felt the impact as pain, rattling up from the floor through fractured bones.

_Parker._ Couldn't see. Just shapes and outlines-- tensed arms of a slight figure hunched over Harrison, hands bunched below his prone head, which meant. Something. 

But, Parker. He was sure. 

_”Being 'sure' and being 'correct' are not synonymous Thompson.”_ exasperated teacher who hasn't forgiven him for spilling Cindy's drink on her homework, and won't change a grade that he can't, _can't_ take home to Harrison. The teacher adjusts his glasses and mutters quieter, but not so quiet that the whole class can't hear, “ _Especially for you, Thompson.”_

The kids who understand what synonymous means laugh. The ones who don't understand laugh too, because everybody else is. And.

Thoughts skittered and slid, like feet in mud. Like bloody palms on a smooth floor. Slid like... like slippery things.

Quiet. Flash thought it was him, the silence happening in his head the way it could after particularly hard hit. Then Harrison's heels skittered one last time against the floor, and. 

Flash thought, _Wait_ and _stop,_ and _No._ They weren't thoughts so much as short impulses that happened between towering waves of pain, but he hung on. Spun in the eddies, and. 

Tried to call out. Couldn't breathe. 

Silence can be anything. Silence can be the sound horror makes when it screams. Flash had to-- he didn't know, couldn't remember, but he tried to do it anyway, forcing himself towards his side.

Screamed. Couldn't help that, because bones were shifting and grating in ways that nature never intended. He fell back into another shock of agony. 

Flash didn't even feel the fingers on his face at first. He registered them at the same time he heard the voice, low and insistent, “Flash? Flash. Come on, buddy. Look at me.”

Nobody else called him buddy. Not like that.

Sure _and_ correct.

_Take that, Mr. Mr..._

Whatever his name was.

Flash felt like laughing. He could remember the laughter and the embarrassment. Every nuance of the feelings he had in that classroom, and the tone that the teacher used, but not his name.

Not an important memory. Shouldn't matter. 

There anyway, behind his eyelids, and deep down in his gut. 

Someone touched his eyes, pulling the lids open. Light shone, too bright to see past, until Parker turned his head and spat out the LED keylight.

"Your eyes are doing that thing, that eyes are supposed to do. So that's. That's good, right?" Parker let go of his face. "Just. Just hang in there, ok?”

_Hang. Hanging out. Parker used to hang out, with that rich kid. Punk. Stupid name. Osborn? Stupid fucking name._

Ache and acid and pain.

Parker's voice sounded in the background, talking to someone else. Maybe Osborn. 

_Hated that kid. Smiling. Like he knew a joke, and you didn't. Like you_ were _the joke._

Flash closed his eyes again. Thought about Osborn, and a deck of baseball cards falling into the grass, and kids laughing.

_What's so fucking funny about pain?_

\- - -

They asked if he called 911. He said yes. Then said, _"I don't remember,"_ and, _"Must have. Right?"_

Harrison hadn't. Harrison had still been out cold when the EMS arrived. 

"We had a fight," Flash said. "He was drunk," he added, like that explained everything. 

They told him that Stacy got Harrison checked into a rehab center. 

Flash nodded. Said, "Ok."

Tried not to say anything else. Or think anything else. 

_Ok._

Out in the open. Everybody knowing. 

_Ok, ok._

Over and over, like it might eventually come true. 

Gwen stopped by with a better brand of food, and a hand for the t.v. since the remote seemed to be missing. 

"Just leave it on the news," said Flash, who figured he'd jump out of his window (second story from a roof below and unlikely to kill him, but worth a try) if he had to watch another round of soaps. Even if the damage, given that the tiny t.v. was on permanent mute with subtitles, was largely self-inflicted. 

Gwen nodded. She wasn't saying much. How much was there to say?

Wish she'd leave. 

Wished she'd _be_ there. Didn't know what that meant, except that she had this distant look in her eyes and was talking about some internship to London after graduation. 

Something about Oscorp came up on the screen. Oscorp. Osborn. Flash frowned, which made his head hurt, so he stopped. He vaguely remembered thinking about Osborn, before. On the floor, after Harrison--

After. 

Good that the doctors weren't counting this as a near-death experience. He'd really hate to think he'd spent a near-death experience thinking about Harry Osborn. 

"Parker ever go there," he asked abruptly, starting to nod at the screen before remembering that pointing hurt less. 

Gwen looked startled. “He-- no.” She glanced away, arms folding. “Not really the intern type.” An edge of something angry there. Bitter.

Flash figured that maybe you don't ask a girl about a recent ex. Not when she's wearing that expression.

He did it anyway. 

"Not ever?"

She shot him a look, but he'd had worse. 

"No," she said. "Never."

Gwen was a great liar, if you didn't know her. Flash knew her. Her eyes were fixed and clear, face gone still and calm as a mask. She didn't look at the t.v. She was carefully, _oh-so-carefully,_ not looking at it.

And, belated realism, “that I know of. Why?” The question was blank and innocent and transparent as perfectly cleaned glass, ready to be run into by the unwary.

Flash shrugged. “No reason,” he said, aware of the weird tension. "It's just he used to hang out with. Uh. nevermind."

Maybe asking a girl about her ex was a bigger deal than he thought.

He tried bringing the conversation back to the other thing. The "Hey, so apparently we have super-sized, semi-sentient lizardy _monsters_ running around our city" thing.

She didn't seem to want to talk about that, either. 

He tried bringing up the other sci-fucking-fi figure, the Spider, finally picked up, cautiously, by major news corporations as being possibly legit. 

"Yeah, weird" she said. And then, "I gotta go."

\- - -

Flash went home.

 _"Stay with us,"_ said Stacy, but maybe he wasn't entirely reluctant to let Flash say no. Man had kids. Kids who didn't need something like a Thompson anywhere in their home. Or their lives. Or their whole goddamned world. 

Went to school, and found out Parker was missing. Funny thing? Nobody mentioned it. No one said anything, until he asked. Somehow, the person who'd been a monstrously oversized part of his life for the last several weeks, still barely existed to anyone else.

_But Gwen knew. Didn't say. Why not?_

He didn't have time to think about it.

It was Tavis who came up to him, exaggerated limp and right arm held against his chest, sneering half-grin on his face as a way to say, _It's all a joke. It's always a joke, yeah?_

So it was Tavis who got a hard left to the mouth. 

Because Flash wasn't thinking right then about "car accident" or "hit and run," or any of the lies that he-- they-- everyone-- needed. Because _"You don't have to tell the kids at school if you don't want to,"_ Stacy had told him. _"Nobody else will. It's confidential. Not their place to gossip about it."_

No. And, god, was he pathetically grateful about that. 

But not grateful enough to remember in time to save Tavis a bloody mouth. 

So off to the principle's office with, "This behavior isn't acceptable, Thompson, but,"

But,

"After what happened," and, "If you need anything."

Flash needed a new fucking life. 

This one was pretty well trashed.

\- - -

 

If Parker turns up dead, Flash figures he's in some real trouble.

_”Was there anything unusual that happened before Parker disappeared, ma'am?”_

_”Why yes, officer sir, a very drunk-ass teenager showed up asking for him. Like, literally thirty seconds before he left._

_”Why, yes, sir. That rather bad senior picture of Eugene Thompson that you're showing me right now is definitely the aforementioned drunk-ass idiot.”_

Flash skips out on school: takes his lunch break out, and doesn't come back. He starts his search at the pedestrian bridge below the children's home. 

A complete waste of time.

Trying to remember the trip to the hangar just brings back shit he doesn't want to remember.

_Parker's arm braced under his shoulder, and._

_Dragged back from the curb when a taxi sped past, and._

And nothing useful, at all.

Flash is tripping over his own feet by the time he finds the place.

By _”Take it easy,”_ the doctor probably hadn't meant, _”Walk down every vaguely-familiar looking alleyway looking for an abandoned building you can't remember finding in the first place.”_

Flash stumbles against the entrance. His bad arm aches in protest. The painkillers are definitely wearing off.

With them goes the vaguely tranquilized feeling of the truly medicated.

_What the hell am I doing?_

There are probably better ideas than this one. He knows that.

It's just, good ideas happen to other people, not him, and he has to work with what he's got.

Find Parker. 

Get answers. 

Flash kicks the corrugated steel.

_Knock, knock._

The sound rattles through the building, and comes back at him.

So does absolutely nothing else.

“Christ, just, come the fuck out already, Parker!”

He means _Be here._

"Parker!" 

"Hey, kid," says a voice from behind him. "You're making a lot of noise, man."

Flash stops, and turns. A figure in a parka is standing a few feet away. Right size. Right stance. Approximately right shape.

But it isn't Parker.

“You looking for your dealer?” the stranger asks.

Angry disappointment would make civility difficult, even if Flash liked the guy's tone. Which he doesn't. It sounds sideways, like a knife angled for the ribs.

“No," he snaps. "Get lost.”

The guy laughs.

No. Giggles.

He shuffles forward, and gets way too close. Flash is hit by a wave of halitosis that could be effectively weaponized. He steps back involuntarily, and doesn't feel the ankle hooked around his heel until too late. 

It's a neat job; turning his retreat into a spectacular fall.

On a better day, Flash might appreciate the craftsmanship. On a better day, he wouldn't have just introduced several fractured bones to concrete.

“Oh man,” says Giggles, standing over Flash with his hands in the air, palms out, “sorry, _sorry._ ”

Flash gapes. Manages, after a few seconds, to get a breath. Doesn't waste it on a scream, but it's a close thing. 

“My bad,” says Giggles. He hunches down, again coming closer than Flash wants him. Which, isn't saying much. The other side of the planet might just be far enough away right now. Maybe.

Giggles makes a placating gesture, hands up and palms out. “Tell you what. Why don't I do you a little favor to make up for that? Nice kid like you shouldn't be out here. So, give your wallet, and whatever cash you were planning to score with, and go home instead, all nice and safe. See? You'll thank me later.”

Flash stares at the sky for a second. It's flat, and gray, and reflects the city lights like a concrete ceiling. 

Slowly, he works himself up onto an elbow, and reaches into his pocket. Extracts some small change and one, crumpled dollar that the snack machines at school had spit back at him. He tosses them at the thug's feet.

“Here,” he growls. “help your fucking self.”

Giggles looks more puzzled than angry.

“You trying to be a tough guy, tough guy?” Giggles reaches into the pocket of his parka, and pulls out a gun. It's a tiny revolver with a blunt barrel, but Flash is suddenly in a great position to learn that no gun looks small when it's pointed at your face.

Flash's head hits the pavement.

“I could fill your brain up with fragments of your own teeth, tough guy,” says Giggles. He shoves the barrel of the gun against Flash's mouth for emphasis. Doesn't sound so giggly, now. Spitting slightly when he speaks. Leaves Flash with eyes screwed shut and stench and trying not to breathe.

“So I think you should show me a little fucking respect, kid.”

Flash opens his mouth for an answer he doesn't have. The metal clacks against his teeth, and.

And then a lot of things happen very quickly. 

A figure lands next to them, and jerks the gun up and away, holding it parallel to Flash with the barrel pointed over his head.

The gun, and the hand attached to it, are wrenched back. And further back. Further, at an angle that arms aren't designed for.

“Hey,” says Parker. Sounding cheerful. Sounding _fake_. “You like messing with guys who got broken arms?”


	8. Chapter 8

Parker bends the mugger's arm to the edge of torn ligaments and dislocation. When the gun falls from his hand, all Flash can think is:

_I taught you that._

Learned it first, at the wrong end of Harrison's impatience, and passed it to Parker along with the pain. 

The man struggles to find a less excruciating position. Flash knows what he is feeling, but, empathy and sympathy? Two entirely different experiences. He hopes it hurts like hell.

_"You trying to be a tough guy, tough guy?"_

Yes, actually. Flash turns, searching across the pavement. 

_Thanks for noticing. Asshole._

The man kicks backwards. He lands a solid hit to Parker's shin that might have dropped most people.

Parker-- 

\--drops. 

Flash barely registers that before their attacker is diving for his gun. 

And stopping. And meeting Flash's eyes above the barrel.

"Hey," says Flash, still flat on his back. The gun wavers in a grip that won't stay steady to save his life. Or anybody else's. "I'm not," he clears his throat, and tries for a voice that he can recognize as his own, "Not sure who I'll hit."

They both stare at him. They don't look sure either. 

"Uh. Wanna find out?"

\- - - 

"Flash?"

"Shut up," Flash croaks. He spent the last thirty seconds listening for returning footsteps and twitching at imaginary sounds.

_("fill your brain up with fragments of your own...")_

His teeth ache. He swallows.

_Hey, Parker._ He can't say it. Can't say:

_Hey, so you aren't dead,_

or,

_Mind telling the police I didn't kill you?_

or especially,

_Where were you?_

Flash hadn't mentioned Parker. He made _"I don't remember"_ his stock response for everything. It wasn't like he expected Parker to show during visiting hours, but he'd expected him to be somewhere that made sense. Not just... gone.

"Ok," says Parker, back from being gone and acting like he never left, "but." He's sitting a few paces away, his back against a stack of barrels. He kicks the pavement. A penny hits Flash's cheek. "Pride and spare change? Not worth getting shot over."

Flash turns to glare at a guy with no right to lecture. Then he blinks, squinting in the poor light. Parker's hands are resting against his drawn-up knees. His fingers are a mess of bandages. The visible bits, exposed in dirt-stuck patches where bandaids have peeled away, are mostly just a mess. 

Flash clambers to his knees, ignoring the wave of vertigo that makes Parker's _"Shit, dude, don't,"_ sound distant, even though Parker is beside him a beat later and trying to ease him back to the ground. Flash resists. He just got here. It was hard. Parker is not allowed to waste the effort. Instead, he knocks the hood back from Parker's forehead. 

One eye is swelled nearly shut. There's a dark strike along his jaw: face scraped red. Other bruised points of impact spread out in interesting colors across broken skin. Parker looks like he went through a brawl with his hands tied behind his back. He looks like a mirror on the worst day of Flash's life.

( _So far,_ adds his inner pessimist).

Flash tries to insert some missing moments into Parker's fight with Harrison: ones where Harrison had a chance to hit back. Could be time knocked loose from his memory that he'll never know he's missing, couldn't there? Head injuries do that. It made a good alibi. Maybe it can explain this too. 

He gestures. "Did Harrison...?" It doesn't sound right. Just trying to ask brings back those moments of dark, intense silence: a hush so heavy that it echoed above the pain. No. 

Harrison... _Harrison_ wasn't the threat. 

Parker's shoulder twitches. It might be a shrug. “Let's not talk about that,” he says. “Let's talk about you. Let's talk about this,” a gesture with the badly bandaged hand, ”thing you got going on.”

Flash doesn't need that tone right now. He doesn't need Parker saying:

“Because you really shouldn't be here.”

There. That. Funny, he'd never pegged Parker as predictable.

Shoulds. Shouldnt's.

He has a headfull of those. And most of them? Completely unhelpful bullshit, like:

_You should be someone else,_

And, _your dad should've been someone else too,_

and

_none of this should have happened._

Great. Ok.

_But guess the fuck what?_ Flash eases back, abandoning Parker's support. _It did._

_We're here._

He pulls the notebook sheet out of his pocket and shoves it at Parker with more force than necessary. Parker grunts, folding over the point of impact like a punched pillow. More damage. Flash remembers the bruises he'd seen at school, but this is worse. The band-aids give Parker's hands a disturbingly taped-together look. His reaction erases whatever doubts Flash might have had. Casual act or no, Parker is in some serious pain. He's quick to hide it: straightening up and catching the paper before it flutters away. He folds it open. His expression doesn't change.

“Oh,” he says. “Hah. Wow. Embarrassing. I'm a fan, ok?”

His tone is _'skateboarding accident'_ all over again: lying and not caring who knows.

Flash doesn't point that out. Doesn't need to. He gestures for Parker to turn the page over. "Homework," he says. “Dated.”

“Uh. How...?”

Flash gives Parker his best judgmental look. "It was in your goddamn locker, Parker."

“Rude.”

“Don't care.”

Flash feels dizzy. Which, again: head injuries. But also the surreal sensation of staring at somebody who is denying, very unconvincingly, that they have somehow become freakishly superhuman. 

Parker is quiet for a while. Then he folds the paper and puts it in his pocket. 

“I made copies,” Flash lies, but it's no better than Parker's half-assed efforts. 

Parker looks away. His thumb lingers on the edge of the page, crinkling it back and forth. For a second Flash can see _him_ again, the kid who had gone missing that day in the gym. Discordant. A beat out of sync. 

_(And hiding, eyes down, flinching away from the cost of being different)._

Flash swallows. 

_Maybe._

Maybe Harrison shouldn't have said _“For your own good,”_ and _“Did it to make you tough.”_

When what he meant was that there used to be another kid somewhere, bruised and broken and hurting, and that kid died to make the man Harrison became because self-murder seemed like his only way out.

He meant,

_”I hate you.”_

_”I hate who I used to be.”_

"I--"

“Ok,” says Parker, cutting him off. “You got me.” He holds up his hands. "I mean, wow, wouldn't want this getting out. So." He taps his pocket. "What do you want? With the, y'know. Blackmail?”

_But it wasn't,_ Flash thinks, _I just wanted--_

Parker's hand clasps the side of Flash's neck, thumb speared under his jaw.

_Answers._

"See, this?" Parker says, false-bright, "This is what I meant. The 'shouldn't do things that could get you dead,' thing. I mean, you think I'm some kind of monstery supervillain, right?"

Fingertips stir against the nape of Flash's neck, raising a shudder.

( _"Looking for your dealer?"_ asks Giggles, still laughing at him from the recent past).

"I think you're a psychotic freak on steroids, Parker," he mutters, disguising the moment of vertigo. 

"Who you're blackmailing. Alone. In the middle of nowhere." 

Flash scowls. "How about you quit it with the patronizing bullshit?" He knocks the hand away, but it twists and catches his wrist. Parker presses something into his hand. Flash recognizes the grip of the gun. He starts to look down, momentarily distracted, and then both of Parker's hands are bracketing his neck. 

"I almost killed your dad," says Parker, real quiet. "I mean, you get that, right?"

Flash is caught between the sick feeling of over-expended adrenaline and the miserable haze of exhaustion. There's too much to think about and none of it makes sense. Shapes on t.v., and a bridge full of cars hanging like cocooned caterpillars. Peter fucking Parker looking like he just walked out of fight club. The hands around his neck. The gun in his hands. A conversation going nowhere and questions leading to more questions. 

_Harrison._

Parker is talking about Harrison. Flash doesn't want to talk about Harrison. Ever. Existence is full of things he'd rather talk about. Mondays. Detention. The Chicago manual of style: eightieth edition appendixes. 

Basically anything. 

"You used to hate it, Flash," Parker says, taking silence for an answer.

"Hate what?" Flash has hated a lot of things. He'll need to be more specific. 

_Why am I holding a gun, Parker?_

"The shit you pulled. With me. Mavis. Everyone."

Right.

Hated it. Hated liking it. Liked hating it. Hated _not_ liking it, and liked not hating it.

The words could tumble into any order and still be true for sometimes. 

"But I didn't," says Parker. "Didn't hate it. What I did to you. I thought I was the good one, buddy." He says it like he's finally letting Flash in on some inside joke known only to him and the friends he doesn't have. "You were the bad one. I was the good one. But." He glances up. A half smile tugs at a split lip without ever touching his eyes. "But look at us now, right?"

Flash can't breathe. 

He makes a first try, and a second. A third failure. He finally believes it. 

His air supply is cut off but it can't be for real because he _knows better,_ doesn't he? He's called the bluff. Five seconds without oxygen and maybe he doesn't know anything except the memory of Parker's face in the mirror, and Parker's silhouette bent over Harrison, and those two times when he'd _known_ that murder was only a matter of time and pressure. 

Parker is leaning in. "Gun, buddy. 'S right there. You're holding it." Pointing out the obvious. Wanting to be helpful. "Use it." So close. They'd be sharing a breath, if Flash had any. "Show me that you know how."

Flash drops the gun. He jams a middle finger into Parker's field of vision. There isn't time or air for anything more eloquent. 

And Parker.

Parker let's go.

\- - -

Flash feels entirely grounded. Like a lightning rod in a thunderstorm.

He looks up at Parker: watches thin, wrecked fingers scrape through filthy hair as Parker paces in a tight semi-circle.

Flash isn't aware of the smile tugging at his mouth until Parker spins towards him and pins it in place with his own incredulous stare. 

"No," he says, pointing an accusatory finger. "Uh-uh. No. Stop that."

Flash laughs. "Think this is gonna be funny someday?" he rasps. "Like, 'Hey, Parker, remember that time you tried to," he interrupts himself with a cough, and wheezes the rest out around it, "death-threat me into staying safe?'"

He answers himself with a second breath, upping the pitch to a squeak. "'Oh yeah, Flash, that was really. Fucking. Funny. Wasn't it? Wonder what the hell I was thinking.'"

Parker has stopped pacing, turning to watch Flash with a ghost of his expression from before, in the hangar. _"You should go,"_ he'd said. _"But you... you're not going to, are you?"_ So happy about it. Awed. _"We can make this a thing."_

Except that they couldn't. Hadn't. Won't.

"Just thinking about your health," Parker deadpans, his tone as perfect as an eggshell. "Somebody has to."

Flash scrubs his hand over his face, then has to catch his balance against the pavement. His fingertips brush the gun. It hadn't gone far. 

_Someday._

The echo rolls back into his head like a drowning wave. What 'someday?' Everything about the way Parker is looking at him right now says that there won't be one. 

_Won't be a later. Won't be a 'next time.'_

Parker is wearing his body like a torn jacket that he might shrug out of at any time. The thought comes with a chill because even if Flash is wrong, even if Parker is just gone and not Gone with the capitol letter and the gravestone, so what?

_You'll be what I drink about. I'll be Harrison, and you'll be my excuse._

This isn't the kind of mess that people fix. It's the kind with totaled cars and smashed-in windshields where people look at the wrecks later and say things like _"I wonder if anyone survived,"_ or possibly just _"Dude, is that blood? Duuuude. Gross."_

Flash's hand itches. It's as if terrible ideas are some kind of particularly gruesome skin infection and he's just contracted the worst one ever. Parker isn't the only one with a point to prove.

"Why." he asks. It's not a real question. He's lived with answer for years. "I mean, who cares."

"You?" says Parker, as if the answer is equally rhetorical.

Flash laughs again. It's like getting kicked in the lungs. He lifts the gun into the silence between them. 

"I don't," he says, "and you can't scare me." He's determined to prove it this time. "Not like that."

_Not more than you already do._

Not more than he always has. 

It's like how rain won't make a person more wet if they're already dolphin crawling with the sharks. Maybe Flash has it backwards and it was rain then and sharks now, but the water's been a constant and the surface is getting hard to keep. If Parker has some screwy idea about driving him back to the shallows, then he needs to remember. There aren't any. 

Parker's expression freezes. Flash waits. He watches for the change: Some glint in the eye or quirk of the lips or quizzical lift of an eyebrow to say _"Just kidding,"_ and _"Don't care,"_ and _"isn't this..._

_..."Interesting?"_

"You can leave," Flash tells him, pointing out the obvious because he's tired of waiting and wary of an expression that Parker might not mean if he takes a moment to think about it, "It doesn't have to matter."

Because it doesn't. To a lot of people it wouldn't. Parker could sneer. Could roll his eyes. Could say _"You're messed up"_ or outright dare Flash to do it. 

Flash knows there are a few kids at school who would.

Knows there's a crowd there that would cheer for this, because civilization could pretend as hard as it wanted but humanity never left the cannibal behind. 

A smirk. A shrug. A turned back. Flash could understand those answers, and then this whole mess could start making sense, but Parker only shakes his head. He's got exactly the kind of tension which he hadn't had on the wrong end of the barrel. His hands are up, palms out. _Don't shoot,_ and _I surrender._

And that's... funny, right? 

Flash feels sick. Parker's expression holds his attention like a vice. It occurs to him that there are so many questions he could be asking. Answers that might come easy. 

_What_ and _who_ and _how._

Never meant to play it like that. Didn't mean anything beyond _'this is mine,'_ and _'not scared.'_ But now? A lifetime of trying to get control over Parker and now, with a gun to his temple, he finds it by accident.

He could hang on to this. Twist it into a weapon and. 

And if there's any single thought in his head that he'd particularly like to put a bullet through, it's that one. 

"Ok," he says. He lowers the gun, and turns his face into his arm for a moment, hiding it in the pretense of wiping away sweat. He needs a second to think. He notes with mild annoyance that his hand never stopped shaking.

Weird. He'd felt calm. Then he looks up.

“It's not like that,” he says, trying to explain so that Parker can stop staring at him like that. "I was just..." _making a point._

_'Not scared.'_

_'This is mine.'_

Parker says nothing. He stoops down and very, very carefully, like balancing the last mini carton of half-and-half on top of the tower at a diner table, he nudges Flash's finger off of the trigger.

Certainty collapses.

Of course his hand is shaking. It's got a right. It's connected to a brain that just came way closer than it likes to decorating pavement. Twice. 

"Oh," says Flash.

There's a touch at his temple: fingertips brushing the point where the barrel pressed home. A forehead braces against his own while he stares down, too numb to feel it.

It only occurs to him later that Parker was shaking too.


	9. Chapter 9

_Hey, buddy, I never hated you._

_I mean, ok, sometimes?_

_Thought I did. Hated what you did. Hated what you were in relation to me._

_But not you, because, how? I didn't know you. I knew the bullshit you hid behind. That's not you._

  
  
  


_It's just._

  
  
  


_It's like--_

  
  
  


  
  
  


_You know when you hit the ground and look up?_

_Human faces are mostly only a set of nostrils. It's an ugly angle._

_But you_ see _people_

_The ones who cheer for it. The ones who pretend to be horrified but secretly love it. The ones who duck their heads and look away while wishing they were anywhere else._

_Then there are the ones who roll their eyes and hold aloof but look at you after with this kind of irritated contempt like, "Your fault," and "What an eyesore."_

_When it gets that way with people, and you don't know how to change it, then you can get these thoughts like,_

_"What if they're right?"_

_"Maybe there's something broken and wrong about me."_

_Because if there isn't, if you don't deserve this, then..._

_Doesn't there have to be something really wrong with them?_

_So you pick yourself apart. Look for the flaws. Find them. There are always flaws to find if a person is really looking but maybe you don't understand that. Maybe you just see the ugly parts of your mind and think, "Ok. That's why."_

_But it doesn't stop there. The pain hasn't ended and that question is still repeating in your head: Me, or them?_

_So you've been picking them apart too. Looking for the flaws. Finding them._

_You finally have your answer._

_"Yes."_

  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  


_And you, buddy._

_I could never shake the feeling that you_ knew. _Most of the other kids seemed blind to it like "No big deal," or "It doesn't matter," but not you. You'd make the right faces, but, like, with the eyes? You looked like you were drowning._

_I know what I said, but I never really wanted you out of it. I hoped like hell you'd ignore every bullshit warning. You were the only craving I had left._

 _I guess I thought, "It's Flash, he'd do the same," and "Just once. Then we're even." I knew it was too much, too far,_ wrong, _but I didn't care. I could "think" wrong, but I couldn't_ feel _wrong. Couldn't feel anything._

_With everyone else it was like acting. I could either learn my new role or go back to being invisible so I thought "Fine. Ok. Maybe this is how it has to go. Alone with people, or just alone. What's the difference?"_

_But then you kept happening. Not following the script. Acting like everything_ mattered _so much._

_You made it feel real. I wanted that._

_Kept letting myself have it._

_But._

  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  


_My dad said that there aren't any failed experiments. Only data._

_I'd say that in my head sometimes when everything went to shit. Make it a mantra, like:_

_"There's only data, there's only data, there's only--"_

  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  


_Data: I fucked up._

  
  
  
  
  
  



	10. Chapter 10

Flash has access to an empty house.

Home, technically, although he's wracking the unbruised parts of his brain for a way to live anywhere else before Harrison returns. Maybe he can follow Parker's example and sleep in the sewer? He spends ten seconds debating relative levels of shit, and then shoves Parker towards the shower. 

He goes to worship a pillow with his face. Pillows don't hurt. They don't give people unappealing new colors or pain.

Pillows. Are. Amazing. 

Exhaustion sets in like an anesthesia. It adds an extra layer of fog to his confusion. 

It's not that Parker didn't try to explain. He did. And Flash tried to understand. Confusion happened anyway.

Which, 

_Why am I surprised?_

No, really. Why? 

Confusing or not, when Flash turned to questions in a desperate attempt to put some distance between himself and the last hour, Parker practically tripped over himself to supply the answers.

It was funny. And it hurt. And it invited Flash to think in directions he wasn't ready for. Not now. Not yet. 

_“There's this guy,"_ Parker started, muddling through sentences like he wasn't sure how to make whole conversations with them, _"He was supposed to be the good one. Because I wasn't. But he was stuck. So I gave him what he needed.”_

Flash waited. Parker waited. Then he got the hint and kept going.

 _“But then we started arguing.”_ Parker gestured to himself by way of illustration. Right. Arguing. The way Flash and Harrison argued. That kind. Except with scales and claws and super-strength and other supposedly scientific insanity. _“He says I forgot what it was like on the other end. Which, sure. Fair. Ok. But now he's started on this forced eugenics project that's like a bioconservatist's worst nightmare on acid."_

_...Uh?_

_"So I have to stop him. And that's funny, because. Because I_ made _him.”_

 _“Right,”_ said Flash, like any of that made sense.

Parker gave him another Look. With eyebrows.

_“No. Wrong. Very much wrong. He wants to mutate the entire city into a race of giant killer lizards with really terribly bad anger management.”_

_“How?”_ Flash asked, and then quickly, foreseeing an even more incomprehensible answer and reaching for something that stood a chance of making sense instead, _“Why?”_

 _"Because he's crazy.”_ Parker's voice was tense with frustration, hands raised to grip the hair above a bruised face.

 _"Because... because he thinks it'll fix..."_ Parker waved a hand, indicating the space between them, and then the city at large.

_"Us."_

Flash laughed. It started in surprise and ended bitter enough to taste.

 _"Crazy,"_ he agreed.

Parker returns, dripping and complaining that the shower only has cold water.

"Heat's off," Flash mutters without opening his eyes. Explains where the booze money came from. Normally he low-key keeps an eye on the bills and finances, not trusting Harrison with either, but lately he was too distracted to play that game.

The bed dips under Parker's weight. The bastard promptly steals the cover. 

"I hate you," Flash mutters, not caring about context. Neither of them have shied away from hitting too close to home.

_We're not ok._

He thinks it like he's trying to remind himself.

Like a warning. Like: _Just because they're smiling doesn't mean they're your real friends, Eugene. Don't believe me? Then go ahead. Get comfortable. Slip up. Fall down._

_Show a weakness._

_I dare you._

Parker mumbles something incoherent and shifts over. The mound of stolen blankets engulfs Flash like a carnivorous amoeba. He ignores that it comes with an arm around his ribs and a head tucked against the back of his neck.

Not ok.

But there, anyway.

\- - -

Peter sits in the semi-dark and squints at his finished page. It's a mess of scribbled-out lines and crowded margins. The surviving sentences look as much like mistakes as the ones he crossed out, but he's out of time.

 _P.S._ he adds at the bottom in what little space is left, _I'm leaving some cash. Good time for a vacation, Y/Y?_

His hand keeps moving. P.S.S. He waits, but that's it. Just an empty space for a thought that doesn't arrive.

He stares at it, potential options scribbling themselves in.

_Take care of yourself?_

No. Flash sucks at that. No need to remind him.

_I love you?_

He almost breaks the pencil as an answer to exactly how wrong that is. Finally he boxes the missing afterthought and scribbles it out.

He stares at the letter for a while. He tears off the P.S. He drops it on the table with the stolen bills, only keeping the ones which are too unmistakably bloodstained.

Then he silently crumples the rest of the page into a fist and tosses it into the wastebasket.

\- - -

“Flash.”

_No. Go away._

Too late. Pain is happening again and he wants to murder whoever brought it back. 

“Flash.” 

Parker. Of course. 

Except that when Flash opens his eyes he's looking at a mask. He startles, jolting his ribs. 

“Fuck!” 

“Sorry,” says Parker, like he means it. Then, “I gotta go.”

_Hell._

It's not like they discussed it. They'd been too concerned with the _what_ to discuss _what next._

"I'm coming." Flash sits up.

"Nope," says Parker, but makes no move to actually stop him.

"Why don't you threaten to kill me again?" Flash asks, false-bright because, see? He can do it too. He reaches above his bed to where he'd stowed the gun in a recess behind the alarm clock. His hand sticks fast to the shelf.

Parker makes another apologetic noise that is somehow more insulting than a laugh. "It'll come free in a few minutes," he says "There's some stuff on the table. Money stuff. Take a vacation, ok? Just... y'know. Leave? For a while?"

"Why?" Flash tests the trap. It feels like his hand has become part of the shelf.

"You could... use some time away?"

"From the city of mutants?"

"No faith."

"None," Flash affirms.

"I've got this," says Parker, with the roughed-up voice and the skin that shows deep bruises even in the gloom.

“You don't,” Flash informs him.

Parker opens the window.

_(Like back in the locker room. Like listening to the door shut because Parker and he are like opposing lanes on a highway. They don't meet. They crash)._

“You coming back?" Flash says, because Parker is on the sill and balancing on the edge of _too late._ Flash doesn't specify a time. The question is more general than that.

_Won't be a next time._

"...Yes," says Parker, after a silence that means no, probably not. "Of course."

\- - -

Flash eventually frees his hand and goes to confront empty streets.

Later, much later, he returns. He swipes the unwanted cash to the floor and kicks the wastebasket across the room. The wastebasket does what kicked trashcans normally do, and makes a mess. 

_A+ coping._

_10/10._

_Would recommend._

He starts to kick the mess into a more manageable pile and sees handwriting that isn't his.

 _Hey buddy,_ he reads. Then he reads the rest. 

_Had. Didn't. Couldn't._

Like none of this applies in the present. Like there's no 'now.'

 _Bastard,_ he thinks, with an anger that rolls against the side of his mind like waves against a sandy cliff. 

_Once and we're even?_

They're not even. They're not even close. He doesn't know or care on which side the deficit lies, only that there it exists and Parker isn't allowed to clear the scoreboard yet.

Flash had accepted the ocean: the realities and the fears that made pushing someone else's head under the water as instinctive as wanting to breathe. The ocean made that impulse understandable if not bearable, or tolerable, or excusable. 

He doesn't want to know about shallow water or the suggestion of sand underfoot. It's Parker's fault. Parker, trying to ditch him on the beach when he'd finally accepted the depths. Maybe he'll touch bottom in time to watch those cliffs fall on him. 

Parker had better come back with a life to threaten and a face to punch because, just this once, Flash won't feel guilty at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Psychiatrist voice:** "Now Tiago, tell me how you _really_ feel about... commas."
> 
> Anyway, one more section and then ~~some angsty porn~~ an epilogue.
> 
> We have almost reached the end of cliffhangers!  
> (Also the end of the story but, y'know. Cliffhangers. Ugh).


	11. Chapter 11

Two bodies fall from the Oscorp tower.

One is probably dead on impact. The other is in the last place Flash looks.

\- - -

Flash followed some good advice.

_Take it easy._

Doctor's orders. He sat on his front porch with the busted door as a backdrop and cradled a lukewarm beer between his hands.

 _Harrison,_ said part of him.

 _Painkiller,_ he thought back at it, _so fuck off._

He frowned his way through the packet which the hospital had sent home with him. 

_Home treatment instructions: basically? The opposite of everything you've been doing. Except the part about the pillows. That part was ok._

He tossed the packet aside. Did it matter? Parker and Connors were probably Arguing again.

 _Will I_ like _being a giant lizard with really bad anger management?_

Connors did. He liked it so much that he wanted to share. With everyone.

_Don't care. Can't._

But other people probably still did. Flash pulled his phone out of his pocket. He could call Stacy. The man would probably answer. Might even listen. Flash stared at the screen like he expected it to blink first.

He was distracted by a door slamming on the next house down. His neighbor walked out onto her porch. She had a phone to her ear.

"You're the only one who has a car," she said, her tone angry. Anxious. "They're your kids, you--"

Flash heard sirens. They came from inside her house: tinny and distant through t.v. speakers.

"Turn that off!" she shouted, cupping the phone, "Turn--" but then the unnamed but easily identifiable 'You' caught her attention and she went back to pleading her case. Something about terrorists and needing to take her kids to her grandmother's place. 

_Well, ok,_ Flash thought, bitter and vindictive when he went into the house and found the keys to the one possession that Harrison had never gotten around to selling, even for the sake of drinking himself to death. Certainly not to pay bills or buy himself and his kid the little niceties in life. Like food. Flash unlocked the garage and dumped the keys in the startled woman's hands.

“Thanks,” she said.

 _You'll be stuck in traffic for hours,_ he thought, edging away from her misplaced gratitude. She might as well stay put. Drink some hot chocolate. Watch a movie with the kids. Enjoy the evening off.

_I'm just hoping you scratch the paintwork._

“No problem,” he said.

“Do you... aren't you coming with us?” She asked when he started to walk away.

“Nope.” He reclaimed the half-gone beer and went back to watching the sky until Gwen called him. 

\- - -

“I hate him,” Gwen said, so much later because most of the city's transportation was in chaos.

 _You're lucky,_ Flash thought.

“It's his fault.” She sounded tired and abstracted, like somebody peering at their own feelings from a great distance without experiencing any real connection to the content.

Flash closed his eyes.

_Mine too._

He guessed it was the closest they'd ever come to talking about it. Her eyes were on the room's darkened windows. She watched her reflection as if it belonged to someone else. A real confidant.

He almost didn't return home at all. In the end he mumbled an excuse and left Mrs. Stacy and Gwen slumped together in the ER's lobby. Mrs. Stacy gave him a look that couldn't be a smile, not then, but it came close.

 _“Thanks,"_ she'd mouthed at him with her arm where his had been around Gwen's shoulders. Flash ducked his head and pretended he hadn't seen.

He couldn't leave quickly enough.

\- - -

The journey home felt like a dream. 

Snow had melted and frozen and layered again over invisible patches of ice. 

The ER had been packed. Too many people. Too much panic. He'd sat in the lobby with Gwen and watched collateral from the crisis pour in like a flood; filling every available room and spilling out into the hallways while nurses working their third shift splinted and sutured and triaged through a year's worth of stress in one night. 

_And for what?_

A paycheck? A handful of desperate strangers? A chance to give death the middle finger, like, _"Hey, not yet you bastard."_?

Hell if he knew.

Within a mile of the hospital Flash could no longer feel his fingers. He wasn't dressed for the weather. Flash Thompson never wore real winter clothes. 

Flash was too cool for that. Too tough. 

He was also, inconveniently, Eugene Thompson. Eugene understood that "cool" was actually a temperature, but he was also too damned poor to buy a real winter coat at retail prices.

_(...And too damned scared to reveal that fact by wearing anything which might look hopelessly second-hand)._

A car horn blared in the distance. Flash imagined a beautiful old classic car stuck in modern traffic. 

And--

_Skidding on old tires._

_A desperate mother behind the wheel. Couple of screaming kids in the back._

_Deadbeat dad somewhere else, somewhere safe, not giving a shit._

The images rose behind his eyes like photographs frozen under a thin sheet of ice. 

They evoked no reaction. 

Flash breathed in the cold and let it out again while the winter wind blew through him without seeming to change anything.

That wind stayed with him when he finally arrived home and closed the door behind him. 

It really shouldn't have.

Flash stood in Harrison's kitchen and watched the curtains above the sink flutter. The window stood wide open. 

He watched them for a while. Too tired. Too cold. He could barely comprehend, let alone speculate. Finally he moved forward and reached up to close the window.

The hand he placed on the counter came away sticky. The stain looked colorless in the gloom; just a dark streak against the relative pallor of his palm. It matched the drag marks across the linoleum. 

Flash stared at them. And blinked. And woke the fuck up.

\- - -

His bedroom door slams against the wall and bounces back at him with nose-crunching enthusiasm. Flash fends it off and stares around. Empty. The bed is vacant and the floor is inhabited only by things which missed the chair or hadn't been kicked into his half-open closet. 

_Shit._

He checks Harrison's room, choking on the stale stench of dust and ancient laundry-- Harrison has done most of his living on the couch downstairs for as long as Flash can remember-- but it's as empty as ever.

He turns away and notices more drag marks on the hallway floor. They lead into the bathroom.

More discolored linoleum. More dark streaks. Fingerprints on the side of the low bathtub and--

\--and the human form crumpled inside, half-covered by a torn shower curtain. 

Flash bats the plastic aside and finds a mask. Removing it barely makes a difference. Battered features and bruised swelling leave little to recognize. Parker's skin is warm-- fever hot-- and for a moment it's the only indication that Flash isn't handling a corpse. Then he registers that the unhealthy whistling sound at the edge of his hearing is Parker. Breathing. 

He doesn't know whether it's a testament to his state of mind or the state of Parker that he looks for a pulse anyway. He finds it and traps it under two fingers as if attempting to make sure that it doesn't escape. 

Parker swallows under the pressure. Groans. "Sai'ut?" he mumbles.

"Parker."

The sickly whistling stops for a second. Parker slits an eye open. The other is swelled stubbornly shut. "Oh," he says, sounding slightly more alert. His hand grips the side of the tub like he's going to get up, but taut tendons and pale knuckles are the only indication that he's trying. After a moment the hand slips and he falls back with a noise that's somewhere between abject agony and a laugh.

"Don't," Flash suggests.

He grabs a towel from the rack and presses it against what looks like the deepest cut.

_Why here?_

Out of all the places Parker could have gone...

Except he couldn't, could he? There wasn't anywhere. Not anywhere that would keep his secrets. 

_"You protected him too."_

_Fuck you._

But it's familiar in other ways too, isn't it? Not the first time he's looked for a god gone wrong and found the wreckage of a human instead. 

He pulls his numbed hands away. 

"I'm calling an ambulance," he says. Parker's hand falls on his arm, fingers crooked for purchase. There's no strength in his grip

"Nuh-uh," he says. "Just. Just gotta stop the bleeding or. Not."

“Fuck you,” says Flash, low and calm with all of his anger going to ice because Parker isn't allowed to ask this, like he thinks that expiring in Flash's bathtub is any kind of ok. He sets his hands to the edge of the tub and pushes away, intending to go for the neighbor's landline. Parker fists a hand in his sweater to stop him. He barely makes it. Flash could pull away easily. He'd almost forgotten what that option felt like.

“Wait,” says Parker.

Flash hovers. He watches Parker pull words together as if they each weigh a ton. “Gonna be aaaall kinds of complicated trouble if I get found like this.”

“Good,” says Flash.

“For you, too.”

“Nice try, but no,” he snarls, sharp and harsh because scared means mean and he doesn't know any other way and maybe, right now, he's got a right to it. Besides, he doesn't need a dead body in his bathtub.

That would definitely clinche it with the 'resident jock murders classmate' story which he'd seen shaping up in the policewoman's eyes. 

He imagines trying to talk his way out of that one without choking on the irony of hands around his neck and cold eyes over his shoulder.

 _Phone,_ he thinks.

_Ambulance._

_People who know about redirecting nearly-dead people in the opposite direction because--_

_(Because pale skin and deep cuts and dark bruises and a face that he can't punch until all of that goes away)._

“Listen,” says Parker, “Ok, ok, listen--” as if Flash isn't. Like he's leaving.

_Why aren't I?_

“Someday,” says Parker, his eyes fever-bright and fixed on Flash's face. “But not now. Not yet.”

“You'll die.”

“Won't.” Parker's smile is red in places that make Flash remember his fist in a face that's barely recognizable now. He lets go of Flash and signs a cross over his heart with a shaky hand. “Promise-- hah. Ow.” His hand drops. He's wheezing with laughter that has no business being here.

Flash hesitates.

_One call,_ he thinks, _one call and this is over._

Then something else would start. Something where other people would make the decisions and it wouldn't be just the two of them in this dark, cramped, claustrophobic insanity fest.

But.

But what kind of decisions would they make? What kind had they made already? Maybe more people would only keep making the kind of decisions that kept a person quiet about teeth on their neck and hands holding them down because exposure wouldn't be escape.

 _I don't trust them._ He looks at Parker. Thinks, _or him._ He doesn't have to look in the mirror to rule out the third party. 

_I don't trust any of us not to make this worse._

He goes on hesitating. He hesitates his way through another bloody towel and then checks and double-checks that Parker has, in fact, stopped bleeding.

“Tell me you've got some sort of super-healing.... thing.”

“Sort of?”

Flash would like that answer better if it wasn't a question.

“I heal faster. Can take more.”

_How much faster?_

_Damn it._

“If you pass out you're waking up in a hospital.”

Parker makes a face. Flash ignores it. He wraps bandages from an ancient first-aid kit until the gauze layers too thin and then switches to paper towels and tape. He feels like he's tying Parker back together.

Eventually he drags a pair of musty sleeping bags out of the upstairs closet and dumps them on Parker, who doesn't comment on the arrangement.

Flash sits with his back to the tub. He wipes his hands on an already bloody towel. The sink seems miles away from here.

“Awake,” he says to remind both of them. Parker doesn't answer.

He has to turn around. Wake him up. Or-- if waking up isn't an option, he needs to find the phone.

_Think. Move._

The sleeping bag rustles. A hand brushes his shoulder.

“Hey,” says Parker, sounding more alive than Flash feels. “Pack. Can you grab it?” Flash spots the discarded mound in the corner. He wonders how he could have missed it.

_Probably something to do with the semi-dead seeming person in the bathtub._

He hooks the bag and slides it over with his foot.

“Front compartment,” says Parker.

Flash pulls out a folded paper. He doesn't have to unfold it to recognize it even though one corner is now painted bloodstain brown.

“Know you made copies and all, but. Maybe you should hang on to the the, uh, 'original.'”

Flash exhales. “Whatever,” he mutters, but he isn't sure if the word makes it out of his head. He blinks. It lasts a lot longer than he expects. When his eyes open again there's sunlight from the window and the bathroom looks like a murder scene.

It's only missing the corpse. 

Flash sighs. He stares at the wall for a while.

Then he goes to find some bleach.

\- - -

Harrison's car is parked on the street out front.

No blown tires. No dents. No bloodstains.

Flash checks it on the way out. Checks it again on the way back. The evidence of catastrophe fails to materialize. His nightmares from last night stay where he'd left them. 

Flash looks at the house next door. _They're fine,_ he decides. 

Eventually.

When it seems safe enough to care.

\- - -

Parker is still missing from school the next day. Flash isn't. He wishes he was.

The biology teacher is talking about brains. Flash sits in the back and draws stick-figure zombies with his left hand. They're completely unrecognizable. That's ok. He knows what they are. That's the main thing. He draws one representing the biology teacher and scribbles in some spilling guts. 

...And lets the pen trail into stillness while he stares at clawed skin and faces torn ragged by breaking windshields. 

"--which is the function of the amygdala," continues the teacher, unaware both of her stick-figure counterpart's grizzly graphite demise and that one of her student's just came close to puking all over his notebook. 

Flash drops his head into his hands. Swallows. 

_The fuck?_

Cold sweat trickles between his shoulder blades. 

He's fine. He's in class. He has both feet on solid ground and his broken arm is steady in the cast. It barely even hurts.

"Thompson." 

Teacher-voice. 

Impatient.

"I don't fu-- I don't know," He mumbles.

Can't the bitch see that he's having a _moment,_ here?

_(...Hopefully not)._

_(Shit)._

He's scared to look up. Scared of the eyes that might be turned on him. 

But they aren't. The room is empty: chairs pushed back and desks as vacated as the lounge chairs on a sinking cruiser. He never heard a thing.

The teacher is watching him. He realizes that she hadn't been asking a question, only waiting for him to leave. 

He pushes back his chair and clumsily paws his notebook back into his bag, ignoring bent pages and tugging too hard at a stuck zipper. It breaks. He slings the bag over his shoulder anyway and tries to ignore how it gapes open at his back. 

He's passing the lectern when a photo on the whiteboard catches his attention. He halts. Hesitates. 

_Don't. Don't ask. Don't go there._

_Too risky._

But.

"Hey, uh," he nods at the picture, "so when a person-- like, drinks. A lot? For a long time? And they get messed up," he taps his head, "like you were saying. But then they stop drinking but they're still fu-- uh, still messed up. Mentally. Do they ever get better? Eventually? If--"

Then he meets the woman's eyes and the words die in his throat. Calling her expression unimpressed would be like referring to one of Harrison's worst rages as _irritated._

 _I know you,_ her eyes tell him, _I know what kind of kid you are, and I know what kind of men kids like you grow up to be._

Her eyes say: _You're worthless._

Maybe she feels like a better person for not saying it out loud. Maybe she'd tell herself _"It's fine, he's too stupid to get it,"_ if she thought about it at all. 

And at the same time maybe there's this other part of her looking out at him that knows he's reading her: that he's comprehending her message. And maybe that's the part of her which betrays the briefest flicker of satisfaction when he flinches. 

Because no human is just one creature inside. Because inside all the parts that make a person can contradict without conflicting: can believe any number of mutually exclusive lies without experiencing even a shadow of self-doubt. 

The teacher's eyes say: _This world would be better off without you._

Flash locks up.

He feels the wet pavement against his knees and the gun is at his head and his hands are so numb that he can't feel his finger on the trigger. Like that hand isn't his. Like he doesn't own it. 

He feels a scream building inside of him but it's trapped there. No way out: a terror grown into a life of its own. 

Maybe it will claw its way out of his corpse after he's dead. Live on without him. 

His legacy. 

The only thing he ever made out of everything he wrecked. 

And yet. 

_Where were you?_

The question comes from a rage which feels older than he'll ever live to be. He wants to fling it in her face. Wants to steal that satisfaction from her eyes. 

_Where were you? When I was just-- and when it happened to him--_

_The people like you?_

_So fucking perfect, and smart, and righteous?_

_But then where. Were. You?!_

Because he doesn't remember her being there. Doesn't remember anyone except himself and Harrison and that damned bottle when the streets went dark and the venetian blinds went down. 

He wants to live. 

The realization comes in pain and panic like the first heartbeat after cardiac arrest. 

_Even if we're all liars._

_Even if we're all monsters._

_Even if we're exactly as bad as all the shit dad saw when he put on that uniform and took those damned calls--_

Flash's thoughts race ahead of a sluggish reality. He's aware of everything. The teacher's faint sneer looks like an expression carved into the wax of a museum doll. 

He doesn't know what he'll do next. He only knows that the action, whatever it is, feels as inevitable as a landslide. His fists clench. The teacher's sneer fades. He watches her expression change like a slow-motion close-up from some t.v. show. _Comedy channel._ Because everything's funny, right? Everything's a joke. 

Fear. She's afraid of him. 

The sight shudders through him like a tremor on a high-wire and he doesn't know, he doesn't _know_ \--

A book thumps on the desk behind him. "Depends," says a voice. High pitch. Low volume. Female.  
Flash can hardly hear it over the rushing sound in his ears. 

"I mean, age, general health, diet, lifestyle. Recovery depends on a lot of things."

Flash turns. A girl is sitting at one of the desks behind him. She must have slipped in while they were...

_distracted._

It's art-girl. He vaguely remembers her glaring at him in the library a lifetime ago. She's one of the school's many invisibles: a peripheral kind of person in one of those low-key cliques who never get invited to the parties and never try. She isn't glaring. Isn't looking at him at all. Her eyes are on the book on her desk, fingers toying with the edges. "My uncle was an alcoholic. We--" she gives a crooked grin and rolls her eyes toward the teacher "--I mean, my folks-- don't drink around him now. He used to be... it got pretty bad. Nobody wants to see it get that bad again."

She has the highest-pitched voice Flash has ever heard. He can hear himself doing an impression. Squeaking. Making her sound like mini-mouse on helium. 

_(Can imagine wrecking her in front of her friends. Making them scared to be near her in case they catch the contagion of his attention)._

_(He knows how)._

_(He's done it before)._

Flash still feels like the room is spinning around him but he forces the question out anyway. "Is he better now?"

"Sort of." She shrugs. "But it took a long time. And a lot of help."

"Thanks," says Flash. Because he isn't walking through the halls in a daze and wondering what the hell just happened. He isn't standing somewhere on the wrong side of a dozen thrilled and fascinated stares waiting for the cops to come and tell him. 

The teacher stands at her lectern and fussily arranges her notes for the next class. 

"Anytime," says the girl. She flips her book open, starting to look nervous now as if it finally occurred to her who she was talking to. Like maybe she's wishing she hadn't opened her mouth. 

"Thanks," he says again, quieter. He turns to the door. 

"He says--" the girl pauses like she isn't sure she should go on.

Flash swallows. He needs to leave. 

"Yeah?" he asks instead. 

"Well." Self-conscious now, clearing her throat like a closet Jesuit about to quote scripture at the pagans and feeling healthily hesitant about it. "When he, you know, when he talks about it, which he doesn't usually but when he does, then he says..."

"Yeah?" It's all he can manage. He had the analogy wrong. This isn't religion. This isn't the mangled echoes of people who lived so long ago that the meaning of their lives has had time to get twisted and tangled and set on dusty pedestals and knocked over and broken and then given a new face-job by the plastic surgeons of politics and the distortions of people who see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. This is a guy in her life. Someone real to her. And Flash can understand perfectly well why that might be hard to talk about. He waits. She keeps talking.

"He says it's like setting yourself on fire to stay warm. Because you're cold. So cold that you think you'll die and so you're desperate enough to try anything. And it works. At first. But you're burning your own skin and when it's gone and the fire dies then you're even colder than before. He says you can't do anything except wait for it to scar over. And, uh." Her voice changes and becomes hers again, not the memory of a man who Flash will probably never meet, "stop trying to be Johnny Storm? I guess?"

The teacher gives a teacherly laugh without an ounce of sincerity in it. The papers rustle in her hands. Flash wonders if she's still shaking as badly as he is. "Yes, well," she says. 

_Class dismissed._

Wanting him gone. 

"Thanks," says Flash, one last time.

\- - -

Flash sits in the dark and listens.

Nothing. He doesn't hear his own voice echoing from the shower walls. Doesn't see Parker's terrible, blank-eyed grin in the mirror. 

He thinks about fear. About how it can watch you from the eyes of your shadow. You can flail all you want. You can punch at the darkness and scream that you aren't scared of it. 

And fear will just sit there. Watching. Smiling. Knowing that you both know that you couldn't sound more afraid if you tried. 

The memories stay buried. 

_Not ready yet._

Will they come jumping out at him later like monsters from the closet? Leave him trapped in a moment that isn't _now_ and isn't _then_ but some hellish in-between?

 _I'm asking,_ he thinks. 

And maybe this is what praying is when you've run out of gods. 

It's not asking for intercession. For miracles. For rescue or supernatural favors or for the clock to spin backwards. 

It's not pleading for the answer you want. 

It's simply the effort to open eyes stuck shut and see the answers which are already there.

No matter how terrifying. 

It's about asking yourself for the chance to turn around and stare down the monster in your shadow until that vicious little motherfucker stops grinning like an idiot because its finally been forced to see you, to _really_ see you, the same way you're finally seeing it.

And that changes everything.


	12. Chapter 12

“I knew you'd be here,” Flash mutters. 

_Wrong again._

He drops the crumpled sweater back onto the abandoned mattress. Both are undisturbed.

_Exactly like we left them._

This place is empty. All he's found are inconvenient memories. 

His eyes shy away from the scaffolding. 

Then they turn back, acknowledging the only place he hasn't searched. He frowns up at the platform. 

_Climbing._

Flash has that competency as a healthy athlete, although a bad head for heights is one of the many secrets he's never shared with his teammates. How to tackle the problem from the perspective of a banged-up semi-invalid who is entirely sick of pain?

_Slowly._

He's sweating when he reaches the top. It turns icy when he stops moving. The wind outside has died down but the chill is clinging to the city with all the tenacity of a bad reputation.

Flash checks the platform and mutters a curse. Empty.

He's about to start down again when a shadow against the wall catches his attention. 

It's... something. He doesn't know. A mounded shape is jammed between the angle of wall and rafters like an irregular wad of gum stuck under a desk. 

Flash stares. Confused curiosity turns to alarm when he recognizes the arm. The hand. The--

_Person._

“Shit. Parker!” 

He can't make out a face in the gloom but,

_Who the fuck else?_

The body's limbs are rigid, tendons visible in the wrists, but there's no sense of life or movement. Parker's form is locked in place in a way that doesn't seem natural for--

_For anyone who is still alive._

Flash reaches as far as he can. His hand lands on a turned shoulder.

A second later Parker's hoodie is slipping through his grip.

Flash hangs on. Tries to tug him back. The effort almost drags him off of the platform before the weight jerks out of his desperately closed fist.

_Fuck._

Flash flails. His hand finds a crossbar by lucky accident and he manages to tip back onto the platform instead of out into empty air. He grips the cold metal and waits for the world to stop swaying.

A few tense moments later and Flash is back on the ground with all of his bones intact. 

He finds Parker laying as he fell. 

Not moving. 

Flash kneels at his side and hunts for a pulse for the second time in as many days. The formerly rigid limbs are supple. That's something. 

Maybe not enough. Parker's skin is cold to the touch and Flash's numbed fingers can't feel a pulse. 

“Yo. _Moron._ ” He grips Parker by the shoulder. Shakes him. 

He should have gone for help.

He wouldn't of had to if Parker had just.

_Stayed._

“Wake up,” he snaps. Like if he sounds mad enough, sounds _sure_ enough, then it has to happen. 

He slaps Parker's head to the side. Not gently. It's a stinging blow to bruises which have already happened. 

He starts to feel clumsily at arms and legs. Looks for something broken. But it's the spine that matters, right? You're not supposed to move someone if they hurt their spine. Or their head. How do you tell? You're also not supposed to leave someone to freeze to death. Isn't that the priority?

Flash won't entertain the possibility that the bastard may have already made those choices irrelevant by _falling asleep in a natural fucking freezer._

That won't matter. Parker's alive. Parker wouldn't do anything as normal and decent as dying. 

_”I heal faster,”_ he'd said. 

_”Can take more,”_ he'd said. 

He better have been right about that. 

“Ey.”

Flash stills, eyes flickering up to Parker's face. He's not sure if he heard the sound or only imagined it.

Then Parker breathes in, slow and labored while his face twists into the 'I-don't-wanna-deal-with-this-shit' expression of a kid being asked to do an unreasonably tyrannical chore. Like get out of bed.

“Noisy,” he mutters. “M'sleeping.”

“No,” Flash informs him, “No you're not.”

He grabs Parker's jaw, thumb digging savagely into a bruise as he jerks his face back to the front. “You--” it's hard to find the right insults. The feelings trying to find words are like very large combat veterans trying to fit into toddlers' toy power wheels. He gives up. “Wake up. Get up. Now. We're leaving.”

It feels good to bark orders. Even impossible ones. Parker doesn't look like he's capable of getting up or going anywhere, and especially not while Flash is practically sitting on him. 

Parker's frown smooths out. His face becomes peaceful as if he's ignoring the grip, the pain, the noise. Ignoring Flash. 

Maybe falling asleep again like he'd said. 

Flash leans down to shout at him. “Hey idiot, you can't--”

Parker's eyes open. 

Flash isn't ready for the expression there. Pupils blown wide. Black holes leading into--

Not hell. It's somewhere that's straight through hell and out the other side. Infinite. Empty. Full of the kind of cold that can never actually be felt because feeling requires senses which won't overload and explode like overcharged lightbulbs. 

Humans can't physically experience a place like that. All they can do is die. 

Sometimes they can die while they're still alive. 

“Can,” Parker says. He smiles. Flash tries to back away from that smile but the hand wrapped in his shirt holds him steady. Pulls him closer.

“I killed him,” Parker says. The smile breaks wider. It splits his face open like a wound full of teeth.

“You had to,” says Flash. Deflecting. Trying to turn Parker's stare aside like a man instinctively raising his hands to block a bullet. 

Parker continues to ignore him. His gaze passes through Flash on its way to somewhere else. “His head was all twisted up. Broken.” 

Flash swallows. A sentence can have unintended meanings. 

Doctor Connors had fallen a very long way. 

No one would ever put those pieces back together. 

Parker continues. “He wasn't thinking right. _Couldn't_ think right. Not with that stuff in him. He-- needed. Needed help. I knew. But I couldn't. So I killed him.” 

Parker's parody of a smile slides away. So do his eyes. 

Down. 

_Shit._

It hits Flash again; ancient instincts reading the eyes on his throat and telling the inner ape to _run_ because the prettiest mouths can hide the sharpest teeth. 

Except that instincts are born of chemicals and chemicals are like words. They can mean all kinds of things and can _do_ all kinds of things when mixed with the rest of the hormonal cocktail known as Human.

Flash grits his teeth. He's sick of being at the mercy of-- of this. All of it. 

“You can't sleep here,” he says. 

Parker's eyes flicker back to his face. There's a spark of something there now; deep in the black. Not quite interest. Not quite amusement. 

But not quite _nothing_ either. 

“'S cold,” he observes. 

“Yeah, no shit.”

Flash doesn't know what he was expecting but the ice-cold hand on the back of his neck wasn't it.

No. Nu-uh. _Nope._

He tries to squirm away but the bastard drags him down, laughing, frozen fingers burrowing under the back of his collar. 

“I hate you,” he gasps, trying to twist away from what feels like two lumps of ice against his spine.

“Good.”

“I'm not your goddamn blanket.”

“Yeah. You're heavy. Need to lose some weight, pal.”

“It's not-- I'm not--” indignant. It's not fat. He's in great shape. Being in great shape is one of the few achievements he has to be proud of so _fuck you._

Parker's chest stutters over that terrible, rattling cough of a laugh.

Flash gives up. 

_Fine._

He slumps, deciding to let the freak do whatever he wants. Apparently that involves cradling Flash's head to his chest like a kid with his favorite stuffed toy. Ok. Whatever. 

_Five minutes._

He's tired, Parker is alive, and they both have a long climb back to vertical. 

It's ok to rest. 

Just as he's decided that Parker decides to move. Flash feels the crazy fool reaching across his back and remembers.

_Too late._

He pushes himself to his elbows and looks down.

At Parker. 

At the gun which Parker is now examining quietly a few inches away from Flash's nose. 

Flash stays quiet. 

He watches Parker thumb the cylinder open.

Parker studies the chambers for a while. Then he clicks the cylinder shut. 

“Ok,” he says. 

He lets Flash stand. Lets him take the gun along on his way up and return it to his back pocket. 

When Flash offers the only good hand he's got, Parker takes it.

\- - -

Flash is approximately one-tenth awake with his head bent at an awkward angle over the arm of the sofa.

The rest of him stays pinned under phantom hands.

They feel too real.

They don't feel real enough.

The ache in his throat becomes a grip on his neck and the memory of pressure spreads to a dozen points of contact. On him. In him. 

_Not gonna make this bad,_ said Parker. 

Believing him made it worse. 

Flash's heart pounds in a panic so perfectly contained that even his lungs don't notice. Every steady breath leaves him starving.

 _Wanna take my time,_ said Parker. 

And did. 

From the first light touch to the full burn of four slicked fingers fucking him open Flash had endured more time than any sense of sanity could stomach.

Enough time to panic at every touch, every catch of a hooked fingertip, every escalation to some new sensation which he would never be able to unlive or forget or wish out of existence. 

_”Stop.”_

_”Don't.”_

He'd bitten the words back countless times while knowing that he shouldn't. That he should cry. Beg. Scream. Do whatever it took to never know what these sensations could do for him.

_Not ok._

_Not alright._

_Not--_

But denial could only take a person so far. 

Ignorance wasn't safety.

But it had let him pretend he was safe. 

The dream shifts beyond memory. He has the hazy impression of pressure at his back. His thighs. A cock against his ass and Parker's threats-- promises-- fuck, _suggestions_ filling his ears while the rest of him stayed empty.

About fucking him past the point of endurance. About.

About the unthinkable reality of another male's cock in his mouth and, fuck, but he couldn't live down the reaction, couldn't forget the rush that had torn through his nerves like a voltage high enough to stop his heart. 

Or start it again.

The paralysis broke. Flash shuddered the rest of the way awake. 

He blinks uncomprehendingly at a dark tv while becoming painfully aware of both the crick in his neck and the unnaturally warm weight at his side. 

The couch. 

They'd made it that far. Flash had pulled the ever-present mound of blankets over them before passing out. Parker was already functionally comatose by that point. 

_Shower,_ Flash decides for more reasons than one. 

He's halfway through extricating himself when the icy-handed vampire he'd been dumb enough to drag home senses the escape of its live-body heater. 

Objection comes in the form of two arms wrapped around his ribs and a face pressed into his stomach as Parker bears down on him. 

“Hey.” He slaps a palm across the back of a ridiculous bedhead. “Let go.”

Parker mumbles something that might be _“Nope.”_

Flash feels the word more than he hears it.

_Not helping._

Resisting the urge to squirm, he falls back on old tactics. 

Tucking his pointer and middle finger behind his thumb he leans over and flicks Parker's ear as hard as he can. 

One amazingly satisfying yelp later and he remembers about how wrestling with Parker hasn't been working out for him lately. 

“Happy now?” He asks with a voice which would be dripping sarcasm if it wasn't too busy trying to avoid sofa cushion. 

He regrets his choices. 

All of them. 

Especially the one which involved not making it up those stairs last night. He does not want to be in this room. On this couch. 

He especially does not want to be here with Parker. 

“Kind of,” says Parker. He doesn't sound sarcastic. He sounds a lot of other things. Surprised. Confused.

_(Accused)._

_(Accusing)._

_(As if happiness is an unexpected guest in the home of someone who wasn't expecting company and isn't sure that they want it)._

The pressure pinning him eases. Flash rolls over.

\--and finds out how many things can suddenly stop mattering when something else matters more. 

Because Flash gets it. 

Every idiotic couple under the bleachers. Every set of terminally oblivious morons who are so absorbed in each other that they never see the world coming to wreck them: never see the bad shit about to happen.

_(Never see him)._

But now the world's flipped and he's become all of them.

Adults warn kids about heroin. About cocaine. About alcohol and porn and cigarettes and fucking _caffeine_ \-- why don't they ever think to warn them about this?

Because this is the addiction. 

Everything else is the consolation prize. 

It's not just him. Parker's expression tells him that they're both screwed. 

_Game over._

The scariest part is realizing that he's ok with that.

Parker is leaning over him with his arms braced to either side. The pose is an echo of every intimidation they've ever exchanged.

Flash gives it the best poker face he's got. Then he casually knocks his leg hard against the inside of Parker's knee. 

It's a narrow couch. 

Gravity is good for so many things. 

Parker goes down with a thump and an affronted squawk which immediately ties for 'best-thing-I've heard-today.'

Flash laughs. He's--

_(--High as fuck. Shit)._

That's what this is.

But he still can't care because for the first time in a minor eternity he's feeling like himself. 

And liking it.

“Oh, no,” says Parker, back on him in a heartbeat, “No, you didn't.” He recovers supremacy with a vengeance and a hand nailing Flash's wrist to the armrest. The other lands high on his chest just shy of his neck.

“Did.” Flash tilts his head back. His mouth gives up under the kind of smile that a person can't stop even if they want to. “I thought you were all tough now?” Showing teeth. Testing the grip on him. “You can take it.”

Parker's eyes spark bright for a moment like he's right there with him and every bit as ready to take the trip. 

Then they dim.

He shakes his head. Bites his lip. 

Saying _'No.'_

Saying _'We can't do this.'_

Flash proves him wrong with a thigh to his hip and a motion which comes as easily as shut eyes and shakey breath. 

The grip on Flash's wrist tightens. When Parker's eyes open again Flash knows he's already won.

Parker doesn't know that yet. 

“It was wrong,” he says. Unconvinced. Unconvincing. The words _”wasn't it?”_ trail after unsaid. 

“Yeah, but.” Flash glances away for a second. Sees tiles and shadows. Remembers terror. 

_(Remembers shoulder-checking Parker to the floor in the cafeteria)._

_(Laughing out a fake apology as food spilled across the floor and)._

_(And too scared of the reasons to ask himself why)._

And before any of that he can see a couple of kids in a classroom. Bright light through cluttered gradeschool windows and eyes straying towards the start of an obsession that wasn't anything yet. Just. _Wanting._ Wanting something that he was too young to define. 

He swallows. “Which parts?” 

Because not all of it. 

Because poison could get into anything. But that didn't make the 'anything' poison. 

The grip on his wrist stirs. Fingertips find his pulse. 

“Last time,” Parker tells him. The phrase lands somewhere between asking permission and laying down an ultimatum. 

_Never again._

Fine. Flash lets him have that. 

Lets him mean it.

He knows that sometimes it doesn't matter if a person means what they say. 

It only matters if they'll still mean it tomorrow.

\- - -

Flash becomes briefly aware of fingertips against his temple. Cheek. Jaw.

_Could get used to that._

That thought is as much of a reaction as he's capable of. 

His body halfheartedly attempts to inform an equally sluggish brain about aches which are happening in previously undiscovered regions of his anatomy. All of it feels too heavy and distant to care about. Disconnected. 

Flash thinks maybe he could get used to that too.

The touch lingers along the line of his neck. Dips into the hollow of his throat. Finds the bruises which wouldn't have happened if.

_(His hand covering Parker's and then that light pressure turning real enough to feel--)_

_(--not asking or justifying or reasoning but simply insisting until Parker complied and desperation burned out the shadows behind his eyes)._

The caress gives way to a breath and then to a different kind of touch. Softer. As delicate as an apology from someone who is learning late that some actions are worth feeling guilty for.

And that others aren't.

_Ok._

Flash drifts under again. He's ok with that. 

Just for now he's ok with everything.

\- - -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Cheerfully nudges story out into orphan space and forever denies having written it-
> 
> ...Thank you for all the comments/kudos/feedback over the years. I'm not the writer I wish I was, but I'm grateful to have made it this far. Wouldn't have done it without you. 
> 
> <3


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